Shakespeare, page 13
James Joyce noted that “banishment from the heart, banishment from home” is a dominant motif in Shakespeare’s drama. The perception may better fit Joyce’s own exilic status, but it has an authentic note. Shakespeare’s “star” may have led him from home, but it would still be natural to look back at what had been lost. Joyce could only write about Dublin after he had left it. Did Shakespeare have a similar relation to the fields and forests of Arden?
There were two roads to London. The shorter route would have taken him through Oxford and High Wycombe; the other arrived in the capital by way of Banbury and Aylesbury. John Aubrey connects him with a small village on a side-road of the Oxford route. In Grendon Underwood, the dramatist is supposed to have found the model for Dogberry. But any talk of “models” is misplaced. Shakespeare would in subsequent years, however, become thoroughly familiar with the wooded regions and ridges of the Chilterns, the valley of the Great Ouse, the villages and market towns that characterise these journeys. The modern roads follow much the same path, through a transformed landscape.
As sensible as Shakespeare was, he would have set out in late spring or early summer. It was good travelling weather. He might have gone in company, as a safeguard against thieves, or travelled with the Stratford—London “carriers.” The principal one of these, William Greenaway, was a neighbour in Henley Street; on his pack-horses he took cheese and brawn, lamb-skins and linseed oil, woollen shirts and hose, to the capital, where he exchanged them for city goods such as spices and silverware. The journey by foot lasted for four days; by horse it took only two.
And then, as Shakespeare approached the city, he saw the pall of smoke. He heard it, a confused roar striated with bells. He smelled it, too. The distinct odour of London penetrated some twenty-five miles on all sides. One route took him to the north by way of Highgate, but the more direct led him into the heart of the capital. It passed the hamlet of Shepherd’s Bush and the gravel pits at Kensington, crossing the Westburne brook and the Maryburne brook, until it reached the hanging-tree of Tyburn. Here the road parted, one path going towards Westminster and the other towards the City itself. If Shakespeare had chosen the City route, as is most likely, he travelled down the Oxford Road to the church and village of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. It was his first sight of the London suburbs or in the words of John Stow’s Survey of London, published in 1598, here “have ye many fair houses builded, and lodgings for Gentlemen, Innes for Travellers, and such like, up almost (for it lacketh but little) to St. Giles in the Fields.” But the suburbs also had a reputation for lawlessness where “a great number of dissolute, loose, and insolent people harboured in such and the lyke noysom and disorderly houses, as namely poor cottages, and habitacions of beggars and people without trade, stables, inns, alehouses, taverns, garden-houses converted to dwellings, ordinaries, dicyng houses, bowling-allies and brothel houses.”2 The young Shakespeare had never seen anything like it before; he must have found it, in the phrase Charlotte Bronte used when she first entered the City, deeply exciting. Then onwards towards the bars of Holborn, past straggling lines of shops and tenements, yards and inns, and towards the terrible prison of Newgate. This was the gateway of London, “the floure of cities alle.”
A traveller entering the city for the first time could not help but be profoundly moved or disturbed by the experience. It assaulted all of the senses with its stridency and vigour. It was a vortex of energy. It was voracious. The traveller was surrounded by street-traders or by merchants beseeching him to buy; he was hustled and jostled. It was a city of continuous noise—of argument, of conflict, of street-selling, of salutations such as “God ye good morrow” and “God ye good den”—and more often than not it smelled terribly of dung and offal and human labour. Some of the phrases of the streets are deeply redolent of London life—“goe too you are a whore of your tung,” and “as much worth as a piss in the Thames.” If you were “snout-fair” you were good-looking, and to have sex was “to occupy.” There were merchants standing in the doorways of their shops, lounging about, picking their teeth; their wives were inside, sitting on joint-stools, ready to bargain with the customers. Apprentices stood outside the workshops of their masters, calling out to passers-by. Householders, as often as not, took up position on their doorsteps where they might trade gossip or insults with their neighbours. There was no privacy in the modern sense of that word.
There were rows of shops, all in one vicinity selling the same limited range of goods—cheeses, pickles, gloves, spices. There were dimly lit basements, entered by stone steps from the street, where sacks of corn or malt were stacked up for sale. There were old women crouched upon the ground with parcels of nuts, or withered vegetables, spread out around them. There were street-sellers with their goods piled high on wooden trays hung about their necks. There seemed to be endless numbers of men carrying sacks and burdens on their backs, weaving through the crowds that packed the narrow streets. The children were busily at work alongside the adults, too, wheeling barrows or calling out for trade. People ate pies or small roasted birds as they walked, throwing the bones of the thrush into the roadway. There were literally hundreds of ballad-sellers, “singing men” or “singing women” who stood at street-corners or on barrels to advertise their wares. There were alleys that seemed to lead nowhere, ruinous gates and tenements encroaching upon the streets, sudden flights of steps, gaping holes and rivulets of filth and garbage.
It was already an ancient place, inhabited for more than fifteen hundred years, and it savoured of age and decay. John Stow loved to survey the ruins of ancient times in the sixteenth-century streets through which he walked; in shape and texture it was still the medieval city, with the old walls and gatehouses, chapels and barns. The sites of the monasteries and priories, some of them dismantled as a result of Henry’s “dissolution” but others put to new use, were still marked out as precincts and liberties. The palace of the Savoy, linked with the French wars of Edward III, survived. The Earl of Warwick’s house, in Dowgate between Walbrook and the Thames, still stood. The Tower of London, to which Shakespeare adverted more than to any other edifice in his plays, still watched over the city. Stone House in Lombard Street was known as King John’s House. Crosby Hall, where Richard III was supposed to have accepted the crown of England, endured. It was only to be expected that Shakespeare’s history plays would be imagined within the very heart of the city where he lived and worked.
But the miracle of late sixteenth-century London lay in the fact that it was renewing itself. Its vigour and energy came from a fresh access of youthfulness. It has been estimated that half of the urban population was under the age of twenty years. This is what rendered it so strident, so tough, so excitable. Never again would it be so young. Apprentices made up 10 per cent of its population, and apprentices were known for their high spirits and for their occasional tendency towards violence. Londoners were often compared to a swarm of bees, quick to congregate and to act in instinctive union.
There is another aspect to this youthful city. The average expectancy of life in the parishes of London, rich or poor, was very low. An early sixteenth-century diarist noted that he was “growing towards the age of forty, at the which year begins the first part of the old man’s age.”3 The expectation of a relatively short life must have affected the conduct and attitude of many Londoners. They were consigned to a short burst of existence with the evidence of disease and mortality all around them. Their experience was all the more vital and intense. This is the proper context for the growth of drama. Elizabethan Londoners acquired, or amassed, experience with more eagerness and expedition. They were quicker, sharper, more colourful, than their contemporaries elsewhere in the kingdom. The reign of Elizabeth has often been seen as that of an ageing monarch surrounded by foolish and headstrong boys; strange though it may seem, it is part of an authentic historical picture. But the boys—and girls—were also on the streets of London, buying and selling, conversing and fighting.
That is why this is properly seen as the age of the adventurer and the projector, the dreamer of vast schemes. The formation of joint stock companies and the promotion of colonialist enterprises, the voyages of Martin Frobisher and Francis Drake, were all part of the same quickening energy and activity. It was a young man’s world in which aspiration and ambition might lead anywhere and everywhere. This was where Shakespeare belonged.
CHAPTER 21
The Spirit of the Time
Shall Teach Me Speed
The city was expanding quickly. It lured both the poor and the wealthy, the immigrant and the agricultural labourer. The aspiring youth of the country came to the Inns of Court, while the gentry haunted the legal courts and royal court of Westminster. The London “season,” for gentry and nobility, really only developed between 1590 and 1620. But there were also more beggars in London than in the rest of the country combined. The city was in a ferment of building and rebuilding, with tenements being erected on any and every vacant spot or spare piece of land. Proclamations of 1580 and 1593 attempted to halt the spread of new construction, but they might as well have tried to halt the tides. Houses and hovels were built away from the streets and the alleys, in gardens or in courtyards, and existing houses were divided up into smaller and smaller dwellings. The graveyards had houses built upon them. A population of approximately fifty thousand in 1520 had reached two hundred thousand by 1600. The shock of the new, for the young Shakespeare, was in part the shock of great numbers of people huddled together in a vast effusion of life.
That is why the city was pushing westward and eastward, too, beyond the city walls. The road between London and Westminster was as busy as the streets within the City, filled with litters and hackney coaches, carts and drays, wagons and pack-horses and four-wheeled carriages called “caroches.” Shakespeare may have been surprised by the narrowness of some of these streets that had not been built for the access of new traffic: the principal streets of Stratford were wider.
London was unique. It was the only city of its kind, and of its size, in England. So there grew a unique form of self-awareness among Londoners. It would be absurd to suppose some sudden change of consciousness—most citizens were too busy to be reflective in that manner—but there was an instinctive awareness that they were engaged in forms of life that had no real precedent. This was no longer a medieval city. It had suffered a sea-change. It was a new kind of thing, an urban mass comprised of people who related to each other in specifically urban ways. It is of vital consequence in the context of Shakespeare’s plays.
The city created, and existed upon, confusion. Thomas Dekker, in The Honest Whore, asked: “Is change strange? ’Tis not the fashion unless it alter …” The rise of the gentry and the merchant class steadily eroded the position and privileges of the old nobility. Kinship counted for less, and civic society for more; privately sworn obedience gave way to more impersonal bonds. It has been described as the transition from a “lineage society” to a “civil society.”
Costume is of the utmost significance in determining the quality of the Elizabethan urban world. Appearance indicated status and position as well as wealth. The emphasis among all groups of citizens—apart, that is, from the Puritan elect and the more staid members of the merchant aristocracy—was upon brightness or originality of colour and upon the wealth of minute detail lavished upon each article. One fashion was that of wearing a very large rose, made of silk, on each shoe. The nature of your dress also indicated the nature of your profession. Even street-sellers dressed in the clothing that would signify their role. Prostitutes made use of blue starch to advertise their trade. Apprentices wore blue gowns in winter and blue cloaks in summer; they were also obliged to wear blue breeches, stockings of white cloth and flat caps. Beggars and vagrants dressed in a way that would elicit pity and alms. In the theatres themselves infinitely more money was spent on costumes than on hiring playwrights or actors. It was a young city in this sense, too. More and more significantly the city itself became a form of theatre. London was a forcing house for dramatic improvisation and theatrical performance. It encompassed the ritual recantation of the traitor at the scaffold and the parade of the merchants in the Royal Exchange. It was the world of Shakespeare.
The city became the home of the pageant, in which all the spectacle and colour of the urban world were on display. On these festival occasions, arches and fountains were especially built, thereby turning London into a piece of moving scenery; the members of the various guilds and the aldermen, the knights and the merchants, dressed in their appropriate costume and were accompanied by ensigns and bannerets. There were platforms and stages upon which tableaux were performed. There was no real distinction between those who participated in, and those who watched, the moving displays. It was a piece of intense theatricality in which life and art were lit by the same pure, bright flame. It was also a means of expressing the power and wealth of the city. In the same spirit an historian has noted, of Elizabethan style, that “it was magnificent by design and saw magnificence the sum of all virtues” with “a glorious ostentation of random craftsmanship” that endlessly diverts: “it never rests; it demands response and elicits pleasure; there is no concession to order or to simplicity.”1 It might in part be a definition of Shakespeare’s own art. The predilection was for bold colour, and intricate pattern, all designed to elicit wonder or amazement. These were also the characteristics attributed to Shakespearian drama. In any one period, all the manifestations of a culture are of a piece.
This sense of magnificence was particularly pertinent to royalty. Elizabeth I declared that “we Princes are set as it were upon stages in the sight and view of the world,” an opinion echoed by Mary Queen of Scots who at her trial explained to her judges that “the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.” Shakespeare, with sure dramatic instinct, populated his stage with monarchs and courtiers. It is the world of his history plays, where ritual and ceremonial play so large a part. But there are surely risks in such an enterprise. A player can be a king, or a queen. What if the sovereign herself were no more than a player? It is a potentially delicate question that he broaches in Richard II and Richard III.
As the Church became desacralised, its candles and its images removed, so urban society became more profoundly ritualistic and spectacular. This is of the utmost importance for any understanding of Shakespeare’s genius. He thrived in a city where dramatic spectacle became the primary means of understanding reality. The pulpit just outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, known as Paul’s Cross, was defined as “the very stage of this land”2 where the preacher played his part, and John Donne declared that “this City is a great Theatre.” An early dramatist, Edward Sharpham, echoed this sentiment with his observation that “the Cittie is a Commedie, both in partes and in apparel, and your Gallants are the Actors.”3 Just as in more recent times New York has become a cinematic city, known primarily through the images in film and television, so London was the first theatrical city. The success of the drama in London, whether presented at the Globe or at the Curtain, had no parallel in any other European capital. From the production in 1581 of Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, there were innumerable plays that used the city as their setting.
The London playhouse was a new kind of building, erected for the first time in this period. People watched the actors in order to learn how to behave, how to speak and how to bow; the audience applauded individual speeches. The drama was also used as a means of conveying a social or political message to those assembled. A preacher complained that “plays are grown nowadays into such high request, as that some profane persons affirm they can learn as much both for edifying and example at a play, as at a sermon.”4 For the majority of the English, the drama of the mystery plays and the morality plays had until recent times been the major vehicle for spiritual instruction and doctrinal fable. It still retained its authority as an instructor. It was not simply an entertainment in the modern sense.
There was a profound recognition of life as a play. Jaques’s metaphor, “All the world’s a stage …” in As You Like It, was already a Renaissance commonplace. In sixteenth-century London, however, the truism acquired a more powerful resonance. For some the conflation of life and theatre was a source of comedy and high spirits; for others, like the Duchess of Malfi in Webster’s melodrama, it provoked sadness rather than mirth. Whatever its precise connotation, it consorted with what may be called the London vision. This has a direct bearing on Shakespeare’s drama. If life was a play, then what was a play but heightened life? The action on stage might be artificial, and might even draw attention to its artificiality, but it was still deeply authentic.
What were the characteristics of this London vision? It combined mockery and satire, discontinuity and change. It included cruelty and spectacle, where bears were tied to the stake and baited until death. It was mixed and variable, conflating satire and tragedy, melodrama and burlesque. It was the context for what Voltaire described as “les farces monstrueuses” of Shakespeare. It often depended upon coincidence and chance encounter. It was interested in the behaviour of crowds. It was bright and garish. It jostled for attention: Walt Whitman believed that Shakespeare “painted too intensely.” It was also implicitly egalitarian. Once the actors had taken off the robes of king or common soldier, all were equal. On the stage itself the queen shared the same space—had the same presence—as the clown. As Hazlitt said at a later date, “it raises the great, the remote, and the possible to an equality with the real, the little and the near.” This was Shakespeare’s experience of the city.
