Shakespeare, page 22
We are now entering a period when Shakespeare’s plays can be securely placed if not precisely dated. And we find what we would expect to find—that he is already a superlative writer of comedies and of histories, of farce and of tragical matter. He was indeed the “Johannes factotum,” the “jack-of-all-trades,” of Greene’s description. The Shakespearian authorship of only one play is debated, Edward the Third, but the others are universally recognised as part of Shakespeare’s work. In the early 1590s we may notice in particular The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors and Richard III.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is one of the first of Shakespeare’s comedies, composed soon after The Taming of a Shrew. Its best scenes bring on a clown, Launce, and his dog; Launce alternately berates and pleads with his dog, but the dog says nothing. It is suggestive of the early sixteenth-century interludes, which also included dogs as comic “props, ” and in that sense The Two Gentlemen of Verona has very ancient roots indeed. It is a rather febrile drama, with a very silly ending, but it breathes the spirit of comedy like the lop-sided grin of a clown. There are no records of any performance, which has led some scholars to speculate that it was material only for private performance. This seems most unlikely, however, since the broadly comic scenes are expressly designed for the groundlings of the public playhouses: “My Mother weeping: my Father wayling: my Sister crying: our Maid howling: our Catte wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexitie, yet did not this cruell-hearted Curre shedde one teare: he is a stone, a very pibble stone, and has no more pitty in him then a dogge”(571— 6).
It seems to have been written quickly—but then, under the circumstances of the time, all of his early plays were composed in that fashion. “A fine volly of words, gentlemen, ” as one character puts it, “& quickly shot off”(656). The same images are repeated, and the same comparisons are made. There are several inconsistencies and contradictions that show evident sign of haste or, perhaps, separate stages of composition. The Emperor suddenly becomes a Duke, and two very different characters are given the same name. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Speed, in Milan, says to Launce: “Welcome to Padua!” It has been argued that the comic passages concerning the man and the dog, easily detachable from the text, were written at a later date. It is most probable that they were added for the performance of a specific clown—Will Kempe comes immediately to mind—and thus emphasise the extent to which Shakespeare was obliged to improvise. He changed his scripts according to change of cast. One of Kempe’s famous routines was to heave his leg over his staff, and pretend to urinate like a dog. And he would have danced his famous jig at the end of the proceedings.
An early date for this play can also be conjectured from the fact that Shakespeare imitates, or borrows, passages from the fashionable playwrights of the 1580s. He takes character and dialogue from John Lyly, a romantic plot from Robert Greene, and lines from Thomas Kyd. It can be argued that he is satirising the romantic drama of the 1580s, but he is at the same time heavily indebted to it. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is part of the atmosphere of its period, and influences upon it can be traced to Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Arthur Brooke’s poem entitled The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie and the courtly literature of the period that Shakespeare seems to have devoured. There is even some evidence that he had read Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in manuscript form.
From the evidence of the play the young writer is half in love with music, of which he shows a distinct technical knowledge, and is already enamoured of the sonnet form. There are other distinct or distinctive Shakespearian aspects—or, rather, aspects that at a later date can be deemed to be Shakespearian. He places romance and farce so close together that they cannot ultimately be distinguished; the lover is followed on stage by the clown, and Launce’s affection for his dog seems stronger than that of the romantic rivals’ for their mistress. All forms of human experience are juxtaposed by Shakespeare, but his tendency is to deflate the heroic and the romantic with broad comedy. We will come to recognise that Shakespeare was a profoundly unsentimental person. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, also, action in the world is subtly confused with play-acting; here, for the first time in Shakespeare’s drama, emerges the figure of the girl dressed as a boy that would become such a token of his art. The play also evinces immense verbal resource, with the principal characters trying out various forms of address with the sole intention of displaying the dramatist’s own skill. It shows a boundless invention and exuberance, in a language filled with puns and rhymes. No other writer of his age was so fluent and so various.
Here, as in Titus Andronicus, we also see the germs or seeds of his later work. The contrast between the court and the forest is one that he would fully exploit, as he began imaginatively to enlarge the English stage beyond the confines of unified time and space. The scene of elopement in the play here prefigures Romeo and Juliet. There are elements of Shakespeare’s imagination—preoccupations, perhaps—that did not change.
It seems almost inevitable that he turned quickly to The Comedy of Errors, another comedy in a hurry. At one point he mixes up the names of the characters from both plays, as if The Two Gentlemen of Verona was still on his mind. All of the characters in the play are in a hurry. The author was in a hurry. In her diary Virginia Woolf once confessed that “I never yet knew how amazing his stretch & speed & word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace & outrace my own … even the less known & worser plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else’s quickest; & the words drop so fast one can’t pick them up.”2 There is a stage-direction in The Comedy of Errors, probably added by Shakespeare himself, concerning an exit: “Runne all out, as fast as may be”.
The Comedy of Errors is a mad play about suspected madness and mistaken identity, with two sets of twins being continually misrecognised to farcical effect. Shakespeare here went back to his earliest dramatic reading, in the plays of Plautus he had studied as a schoolboy, but characteristically goes a stage further in complication and intrigue. It is in terms of structure, however, a perfectly “correct” Roman play. Unusually among his plays it observes the “unities” of time and place as adumbrated by Aristotle, with a single action occurring in a single place during the course of a single day. It was played upon a stage with three doors, or “houses,” in a row like the set of some classical comedy. It is as if he had decided to prove, to his university-educated contemporaries, that he was not as unlearned as they assumed.
So The Comedy of Errors is for him an exercise in ingenuity as much as in comedy. His is a predominantly verbal humour, rapid, elaborate and ingenious. It is, as Coleridge put it, “in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce.”3 In that respect it requires a writer of the highest intelligence and sensitivity to maintain the pace and direction of the action. It might be seen as a slightly derivative and old-fashioned play, written by a schoolmaster of genius, since there are also elements of the morality play in its composition. As a schoolboy Shakespeare used the volume of Plautus edited by Lambinus, in which there are manifold references to various “errors.” Hence perhaps the title. But the play is not entirely derived from memories of the classroom. He is still close to Marlowe and to Lyly, from whom he lifts lines and situations. T. S. Eliot once suggested that bad poets borrow while good poets steal; Shakespeare managed to do both.
It has the distinction of being Shakespeare’s shortest play, but it is not without its subtleties of characterisation. We see here what might be called the natural bent of Shakespeare’s imagination, with the superiority of servants over their masters and the natural good sense of women contrasted with the wilful obtuseness of men. There also appears, in this comedy of twinship, the theme of self-division that runs through much of Shakespeare’s mature drama:
… oh how comes it,
That thou art then estranged from thy selfe? (500—l)
The fact that these lines are uttered by a wife, who believes that she has been abandoned by her husband, may add a private note of self-communing. In this play, as in so many others of Shakespeare, a family is reunited after many vicissitudes, and lost children are restored.
Self-estrangement has become so obvious a topic of Shakespearean commentary that it is often forgotten that it is peculiar to, and symptomatic of, his genius. Whether Shakespeare divined within himself the play of contraries, or whether it was the fruit of observation, is an open question. As a country boy come to London, as a player with aspirations to gentility, as a writer as well as an actor, he had ample scope for contemplation. We also have the interesting spectacle of an utterly practical and business-like man who was able to create a world of passion and of dream. That is perhaps the greatest mystery of all. He had within himself legions. He saw the human truth in any argument or controversy. All the evidence of his plays suggests that if he expressed a truth, or even an opinion, an opposing truth or opinion would then occur to him—to which he would immediately give assent. That was for him the natural condition of being a dramatist. It has often been noticed that in the plays there is no sense of Shakespeare’s personality, and that the characters themselves do all the thinking. It has also been suggested that there is a consistent and characteristic “doubleness” within the plays, whereby heroic or mighty action is duplicated by the fools and clowns. There are also occasions when an action can be interpreted in two different ways, or a passion such as sexual jealousy can seem both justified and unjustified. But doubleness is not the right word. Kings and clowns are all part of the essential singularity of his vision.
CHAPTER 34
They Thought It Good
You Heare a Play
In 1591 and 1592 it is likely that the young Shakespeare was working on more than one play at once for Pembroke’s Men. There is no reason why he could not move from comedy to history or tragedy, since he mingles these within individual scenes and even speeches. The Tragedy of King Richard III seems to have occurred to Shakespeare as he was completing The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York. The character emerges in the earlier drama but in subsequent revision, as we have observed, Shakespeare deepened and darkened the portrait in anticipation of the more accomplished play. It was a role for Burbage himself.
Richard Burbage did indeed become the principal interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays for the rest of the dramatist’s life. The recognised leader of the company, he specialised in heroic or tragic roles. It was written of him that
whatever is commendable in the grave orator is most exquisitely perfect in him; for by a full and significant action of body he charms our attention. Sit in a full theatre, and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears while the actor is centre … for what we see him personate we think truly done before us.1
It was he who played the first Lear, the first Hamlet and the first Othello. It is also likely that he introduced Romeo and Macbeth, Coriolanus and Prospero, Henry V and Antony, to the English stage. No other actor in the world has ever achieved so much. The naturalness and liveliness of his “personation” are often mentioned. He was considered to be a Proteus of changing identity, “so wholly transforming himself into his Part, and putting off himself with his Cloathes, as he never (not so much as in the Tyring-house) as-sum’d himself again until the Play was done … never falling in his Part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gestures maintaining it still unto the heighth.”2 He was perhaps Shakespeare’s most familiar companion. The dramatist left him money to purchase a ring, but the names of Burbage’s children are perhaps a better token of their intimacy. He had a daughter named Juliet, who died young; he had a son called William and another daughter named Anne.
And so we see Burbage, at the age of twenty-one, walking onto the stage as Richard III. The medieval Vice was the traditional way of representing evil. Yet Richard seems to emerge fully armed even as Shakespeare thought of him, as if he had come from his imagination even as he had ripped his way out of his mother’s womb. For the first time on the English stage the Vice is capable of growth and change: Richard experiences the first faint stirrings of conscience on the eve of the battle of Bosworth. It is only momentary, but his powerful lines prefigure the agonies of Macbeth and Othello: “What do I feare? my selfe? theres none else by”.
Shakespeare was too great a dramatist to rest with the conventions. He had to reinvent the paths of human consciousness in order to stay true to his interior vision. He had transcended his sources and influences—Hall, Holinshed, Seneca with the rest—by combining them in fresh and unexpected ways. The high chant of formal rhetoric is mixed with comic asides, the melodramatic with the erotic. The rough wooing of Lady Anne springs to mind, although it is hard to think of any Shakespearian scene between the sexes that is not touched by malice or competition. He had not forgotten his lessons from Marlowe, and there are echoes of Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta in Richard III.
Now it was Marlowe’s turn to learn from him. It is generally agreed that his Edward II derives part of its inspiration from Shakespeare’s play. And why should it not be so? The theatre was a place of continual imitation. The Tragedy of King Richard III was the longest and most ambitious play that Shakespeare had written. (Only Hamlet is longer.) It moves from one climax of invention and feeling to the next, never slackening its pace. In this play Shakespeare blossoms and unfolds. He loves the villainy and malice of the crook-back. He exults in them. There is an atmosphere of mystery and of prophecy—of ancient archetypes and mythical encounters—that raises English history to a new level of significance and meaning. That was one of Shakespeare’s great gifts to English drama.
Richard III quickly became popular, with an almost unprecedented eight reprints of the quarto text, three of these after Shakespeare’s death. The despairing cry, “A horse, a horse, my kingdome for a horse,” was parodied and repeated in a hundred different contexts. Thus we have “A man! A man! A kingdom for a man!”(Scourge of Villanie, 1598), “A boate! A boate! A full hundred marks for a boate!”(Eastward Ho!, 1605) and “A foole! A foole! My coxcomb for a foole!”(Parasitaster, 1606). It would not be at all surprising to discover that it became a popular catchphrase on the streets of London.
We can only speculate about Burbage’s performance as Richard III. There is, however, one small clue: “The king is angrie, see, he gnawes his lip.” Catesby notices this mannerism, but it is one that Burbage also employed in the part of Othello. “Alas,” Desdemona asks, “why gnaw you so your neather lip?” There is a reminder of Burbage’s power as an actor in an anecdote in the diary of a citizen called John Manningham.
Vpon a tyme when Burbidge played Richard III there was a citizen grone soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night vnto hir by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare ouerhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained and at his game ere Burbidge came. The message being brought that Richard the Third was at the dore, Shakespeare caused returne to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.3
It is an unproven and unprovable story, but the anecdote was repeated in the mid-eighteenth century within Thomas Wilkes’s A General View of the Stage. Wilkes could not have copied it from Manningham’s diary, since that diary did not emerge until the nineteenth century. It would be reasonable to assume that the young Shakespeare was not immune to the delights of London life, although this anecdote emphasises his quick-wittedness rather more than his lechery.
So there are two comedies, and one history, that can plausibly be attributed to Shakespeare’s connection with Pembroke’s Men and to his early association with Richard Burbage. And then there is the unsettled question of Edward the Third. Many scholars believe that it was not written by Shakespeare, but it has elements of his early genius, not least in the choice of sonorous phrase:
… poison shows worst in a golden cup;
Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
The last line reappears in the ninety-fourth of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and bears all the marks of Shakespeare’s profoundly dualistic imagination.
The fact that certain scenes in the play, particularly those concerning the wooing of the Countess of Salisbury by the monarch, are more accomplished than others, has raised the question once more of collaboration with unnamed dramatists. Shakespeare is supposed, at various times of his career, to have collaborated with Jonson and Fletcher, Peek and Munday, Nashe and Middleton. There is no reason at all why he should not have done so. It has been estimated that between one-half and two-thirds of all plays written during Shakespeare’s lifetime were composed by more than one hand. Some plays were written by as many as four or five different authors. That is why plays tended to be the property of the company or the playhouse rather than of an individual. The emphasis was upon speedy and efficient production. It is even possible that writers formed groups or syndicates for the writing of dramas, on the same pattern as the roving bands of medieval illuminators, the members of which specialised in different aspects of the art of painting. Collaboration between dramatists was a familiar and conventional procedure, in other words, with various acts going to various hands or plot and sub-plot being given separate treatment. There were some writers who specialised in comedy, others in pathos. Shakespeare was the exception, perhaps, in the sense that he excelled in all branches of the dramatic art. He may have been exceptional, too, in retaining proprietorship of his own plays. There is of course also the possibility that passages or scenes were added to his plays at a later date by other writers. This may have happened, for example, with Macbeth and with Othello.
