Shakespeare the entertainer
Shakespeare was in the entertainment business. He made his living mainly from writing and acting in plays. He was so successful that he became a ‘sharer’ in his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and in their theatre, the Globe. The company name indicated that the Lord Chamberlain was the patron of the company. Without having a patron it was against the law to act in plays professionally, but this did not mean that the Lord Chamberlain actually subsidized the company. Through his name the actors were protected; without it they could have been prosecuted as vagabonds and vagrants.
‘…all Fencers Bearewardes Comon Players in Enterludes & Minstrels, not belonging to any Baron of this Realme or towardes any other honourable Personage of greater Degeree; all Juglers Pedlars Tynkers and Petye Chapmen;…[who] shall wander abroade and have not Lycense of two Justices of the Peace at the least,…shal bee taken adjudged and deemed Roges Vacaboundes and Sturdy Beggers.’
Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds 1572 (quoted in Gurr, A. [1970: 19], The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
The Globe Theatre was not the first theatre where the Lord Chamberlain’s Men acted or for which Shakespeare first wrote plays; that playhouse was ‘The Theatre’, situated north of the city of London. The lease for that playhouse ran out in 1597, so for the following year the company played at the neighbouring theatre, the Curtain, before moving to the Globe, which opened in 1599. The actors had to run their theatre and company as a commercial concern. Later, Shakespeare took a business interest in a further smaller indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, where the company could perform in winter. After the accession in 1603 of James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I, the King became the patron of the company, which then became known as the King’s Men.
The Red Lion (1567) in Whitechapel was probably the first public theatre in London. In 1576 it was replaced by ‘The Theatre’, built by James Burbage in Shoreditch just outside the city walls. Burbage had been a carpenter and in 1575 had worked at Kenilworth Castle on the creation of the stage for the entertainment planned for the visit of Queen Elizabeth I to the Earl of Leicester, who owned the castle. Kenilworth was not far from Stratford-upon-Avon where Shakespeare lived. The Queen’s visit was a great occasion for the locality and occurred when Shakespeare was just 11 years old. We can only speculate about whether the boy went to the castle in the hope of seeing the Queen or whether he heard talk of it. Leicester entertained Elizabeth for 19 days, from 9 to 27 July. We know also that travelling players regularly performed in Stratford during Shakespeare’s childhood. There are, of course, no records of Shakespeare’s engagement with them but entertainment appears to have got into his blood from somewhere.
Shakespeare’s works are easier to enjoy and to put into context if he is freed from the carbuncles of history and cultural elitism that have grown up around him. We may then get back to the purpose of the plays – to attract people from all strata of society to what is popular entertainment.
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There is much speculation about Shakespeare’s life before he arrived in London in the early 1590s, when he is first mentioned as an actor and a writer. We will come to that speculation later but it is held that in 1594 a playwright, Robert Greene, reportedly on his deathbed, complained that Shakespeare was taking and using the work of other dramatists to make his way in the theatre. Greene, apparently out of resentment, calls him an ‘upstart Crow’. Whether it was Greene or another writer – for example Thomas Nashe or Henry Chettle who wrote the Groatsworth of Wit but published it under Greene’s name – is a matter for debate. (See, for example, Katherine Duncan-Jones [2010: 48–56].) It is said that Greene died from ‘a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring’!
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‘…trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and, being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.’
Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance, 1592
Whoever made the ‘upstart Crow’ accusation, it’s apparent just from looking at Shakespeare’s plays and consulting his sources that he adapted and rewrote some known plays and to great effect, since it appears that he was making them more popular and enduring with his audiences.
For the majority of his plays throughout his career, Shakespeare used known stories, plays and other sources to create his dramas, and to bring people into the theatre to entertain them and to make money for his company and for himself.
Shakespeare the businessman
As a ‘sharer’ in the company, Shakespeare had part-ownership of the company and the properties, the scripts and the costumes. It was what we might regard as a communal business with the risks shared, at first, between eight and, later, 12 fellow members of the company. Their business manager was John Heminges, one of the two men who later published the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works in 1623. When Shakespeare retired, in 1613 or thereabouts, he was quite a wealthy man, owning handsome properties in Stratford and London and some land. He was also involved in a controversy over a proposal to enclose some of this land, which would have allowed him to make more money but at the expense of poorer people. As it happened, the particular proposal was not successful. We know that he also loaned money and that he purchased a large house in London, which he rented out.
Shakespeare wrote his plays primarily for the company in which he had a business interest, and they were usually performed in one or other of the theatres in which he had a financial interest. Thus he was not only a poet and dramatist but also what we would today term a businessman.
There appears with Shakespeare to have been no separation between the ownership of the means of production and the participation in the means of production – the plays in performance. Shakespeare was working at a time when capitalism was in its infancy and when modern industrial relations had yet to be developed. His theatre was in the business of generating income and was therefore at the centre of commercial activity, although there was a general cultural suspicion of the process of commodification that resulted from the growth of a market economy.
Shakespeare through time
Shakespeare was born in 1564, probably on 23 April, which is St George’s Day (the patron saint of England), and he died in 1616, possibly on his birthday. The actual dates of birth and death are speculative; they are mainly based on the dates of his christening (26 April 1564) and burial (25 April 1616), although the bust of him that was erected some time later in Holy Trinity Church does give 23 April as the date of his death, at the age of 53.
We might consider whether Shakespeare believed that as a dramatist he would be so highly regarded four hundred years after his death. He certainly had the desire, and he thought he would gain immortality through his non-dramatic poetry, as shown, for example, in Sonnet 60 where he writes that although ‘Time’ brings youth and beauty to an end when ‘…nothing stands but for his scythe to mow’, he yet hopes that his writing will last: ‘And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,/Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.’ But like a number of his contemporaries, with the exception of Ben Jonson, he may have regarded his plays as ephemeral and, as far as we know, he did not himself seek to have them published. He may have distinguished between his non-dramatic poetry and a play such as Love’s Labour’s Lost, which is critical of ‘fame’, although Kiernan Ryan believes that he was aware that future audiences would see his plays.
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‘To grasp a Shakespearean play as fully as possible at any point in time is to recognize that its gaze is bent upon a vanishing point at which no reader or spectator can hope to arrive. Like the hat that the circus clown kicks out of reach every time he steps forward to pick it up, final comprehension of the play is perpetually postponed by each act of interpretation. Built into Shakespeare’s plays, as into his poems, is the expectation that whatever eyes are viewing them at a given moment, other “eyes not yet created” (Sonnet 81) will one day view them in another light.’
Ryan, K. (2001: 198), ‘Shakespeare and the Future’, in Cartmell, D. and Scott, M., Talking Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Palgrave
His trust in the endurance across time of poetry to praise the lover is a powerful theme exemplified also in Sonnet 55, where he exalts both the art of the poet and the lasting memory of the one to whom it is addressed.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire, shall burn
The living record of your memory:
’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity,
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
Of his 37-plus plays (as we will see in Chapter 27, scholars claim that he had a hand in more plays, usually as a collaborator, and it is now generally accepted, for example, that a 38th, The Two Noble Kinsmen, was written by him and John Fletcher), only 18 were published during his lifetime. All of these, except Pericles, were republished with the other 19 in the first collected edition of his works, prepared seven years after his death by two of his friends and fellow actors in 1623: John Heminges, referred to earlier, and Henry Condell. This collected edition, known as the First Folio, did not include Pericles, which was subsequently ascribed to him. (The Two Noble Kinsmen was published in a single edition in 1634, naming John Fletcher and William Shakespeare as the joint authors; that text was reprinted in 1679 in the Second Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies).
Single editions of the plays were known as quartos, and in Shakespeare’s case those published had usually been authorized by his company. Some ‘pirated’ editions, however, as we will see in Chapter 21, were also published without his or his company’s approval.
The words ‘folio’ and ‘quarto’ refer to the size of a book’s leaves. For a folio edition, the standard sheet of paper of about 340 × 430 mm (13.5 × 17 inches) was folded once, making two leaves or four pages. For the smaller quarto the standard sheet was folded twice, making four leaves or eight pages.
This dramatist, who never went to university, came from a relatively modest background; his father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and, although a prominent citizen and one-time alderman of Stratford-upon-Avon, found himself in serious financial trouble. Yet by the early nineteenth century, as we will see, his son William became almost deified in the way in which intellectuals regarded him.
Shakespeare’s reputation in schools – and beyond – is often framed by difficulty. You might yourself have made or heard such statements as ‘I was put off Shakespeare at school’, ‘Shakespeare’s not for the likes of me’, ‘I don’t understand the words’, ‘It’s boring’ or ‘I don’t know what it means’. For Shakespeare, I would imagine, these statements would be anomalous, even heartbreaking, so try not to let negative statements put you off.
For example, after working on a Shakespearean play for a short time, a student said, ‘I don’t understand this play.’ ‘What don’t you understand?’ I asked. ‘The words,’ he replied. ‘Which words?’ ‘All of them,’ he answered! Of course, he did understand most of the words but was fearful of the poetry at first. He persevered by allowing the words to flow over him and, as he became more engrossed in the story, so he started to enjoy and appreciate the play.
Shakespeare wrote plays not for an elite but for people from all strata of society to enjoy. His theatre, the Globe, was in an area of London where there were bear-baiting pits, brothels and taverns. The plays were written as popular entertainment and they worked as such. They brought in the crowds. They made money for him and his fellow actors in the theatre.
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What I want to do in this book is to allay the fear of Shakespeare, and take you, the reader, back to how Shakespeare developed and constructed his plays for popular entertainment. I am, of course, part of the Shakespearean ‘industry’ but I want to release Shakespeare from the confines of the layers of commentary that have grown over his dramas. I want to concentrate not on what the plays mean, but how they work, and I want you to come with me on a journey through the plays, as I introduce you to their structures, their plots and language, so that you too might be entertained by them. Certainly, I will attempt to demystify the jargon and delineate the various critical schools and approaches, but we will concentrate on how the plays work and how we, four hundred years after their creation, can respond to them.