Shakespeare, page 51
So we can deduce that Edmund Shakespeare had travelled to London and had taken up the profession of “Player,” imitating the career of his famous brother. Whether he had taken up the profession on his brother’s advice, or whether he had simply followed his example, is not known. The fact that his son was baptised in Shoreditch and buried in Cripplegate must mean that Edmund was living in the northern suburbs, and that he was probably playing at the Curtain Theatre. He was living very close to Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street, in fact, and it is even possible that he shared them with him. There is no official record of his marriage, so he had also sired a bastard son. This was a not uncommon phenomenon in early seventeenth-century London but it does suggest that Edmund Shakespeare, now in his mid-twenties, was living a somewhat irregular existence as a player.
There are other domestic events to record. On 14 October 1607, in the parish church of Stratford, the son of Richard Tyler was baptised as “William”; it is possible that William Shakespeare was his godfather. Tyler, two years younger than Shakespeare, was a friend and neighbour of the dramatist. He was also no doubt at school with him. He was bequeathed a ring in the first draft of Shakespeare’s will. Richard Tyler was a prosperous yeoman and gentleman, living in Sheep Street, who had held civic office and had been elected as churchwarden. In an official document he is described as “a man of honest Conversacion & quiet & peacable Carryage amongst his neighbours & towards all people.”2 Very little else is known about Tyler, but he may stand as representative of Shakespeare’s Stratford acquaintances. They were generally prosperous, some of them being tradesmen and some of them being, like Tyler, “gentlemen.” They were “honest” and “quiet” and “peacable,” very much the model of the English townsman of this period. And Shakespeare remained on affectionate terms with them all his life. It is hard not to suspect that they were comfortable and welcome company after the vivid and more excitable ambience of London. Shakespeare could relax with them, converse with them, drink with them, without the constant press of theatrical business. Four days after the baptism of little William Tyler in the parish church, Shakespeare’s nephew, Richard Hathaway, baker, was married at the same altar. If the laws of family life applied to the Shakespeares, then the dramatist would have been present for that occasion also.
These rituals were taking place in the immediate aftermath of great local disturbance. The “Midlands Rising” was punctuated by savage enclosure riots directed against the larger landowners. The problems were particularly acute in the Forest of Arden where the enclosers had “turn’d so much of woodland into tillage … that they produce corn to furnish other counties.” The ironworks in the region had also “destroyed prodigious quantities of wood,”3 and the old commons had been transformed into privately owned pasturage. No one denied that the land was the property of the landowner; the rioters were protesting against the overthrow of centuries of traditional usage. There was also anger and dismay at continuing food shortages, a dearth which in the popular mind was associated with the pace of enclosures.
The rising began on the eve of May Day and quickly spread throughout the Midland counties until it became a summer of insurrection. The king issued a royal proclamation deploring the fact that “many of the meanest sort of people have presumed lately to assemble themselves riotously in multitudes.”4 The rebellion was only halted after savagely repressive measures by the authorities; the military killed scores of protesters, and many of those captured were hanged, drawn and quartered. The problems were, almost literally, on Shakespeare’s doorstep and they entered at least one of his subsequent dramas.
In the winter season of this year, stretching from December 1607 to February 1608, the King’s Men staged thirteen plays at the court for the benefit of the royal family. The names of these plays have not been recorded, but it is a fair assumption that one of them was the drama entitled The Tragedie of Antony and Cleopatra. In Samuel Daniel’s verse drama Cleopatra, reissued in this year, there is a detailed and expressive description of the dying Antony being hoisted onto Cleopatra’s “monument.” This had not appeared in the earlier version of Daniel’s play, printed in 1594, and suggests that Daniel had witnessed a performance of Shakespeare’s scene in which, according to the stage-directions, “They heaue Antony aloft to Cleopatra.” It has all the marks of a visual, rather than a verbal, memory. Since the theatres were closed from July onwards by reason of the plague, the likelihood must be that Daniel saw the play at the Globe in the late spring or early summer of 1607. It was restaged that Christmas for the benefit of the sovereign.
It is possible, however, that the audiences of the time remained unmoved by Antony and Cleopatra. With the exception of the allusion by Samuel Daniel, there is no recorded comment on its production. It was not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime—and nor indeed was that other Roman drama, Coriolanus. If they had not been included in the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works, there would be no surviving text.
For Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch and from Horace, from Montaigne and from Pliny. It says something about the effect of the theatre and the permanence of theatrical memory that this doomed love between Antony and Cleopatra, together with the assassination of Julius Caesar, have become the two most famous episodes of Roman history. With the magniloquent verse of Antony and Cleopatra, in particular, Shakespeare has reinvented the last years of republican Rome. The language of passion and aspiration dominates this play. It valorises everything, with the billowing rhetoric of the Egyptians contrasted with the high Roman rhetoric of time and duty. It is the oration conceived as poem. By some unerring insight, too, he has divined the essential characteristics of the protagonists. Octavius Caesar here bears all the incipient greatness and ruthlessness of the ruler who would become Augustus, the first emperor in Roman history.
Shakespeare’s imagination seems to have been stirred by the vastness of the enterprise he is enacting; there are images of the world and of immensity, with the main protagonists in the early stage of becoming deities. Antony and Cleopatra could have echoed the emperor Vespasian’s words upon his death-bed, “I am afraid I am turning into a god.” But they embrace that fate; they long for metamorphosis. No play has so wide a stage, with so many scenes and with so many messengers from the boundaries of the known world—except that there are no boundaries and no limits, in this evocation of immensity. It is a pageant, a moving tableau, a procession. That is why Antony and Cleopatra are intensely theatrical creations, admiring their images as if they had been projected by some conjuror upon a linen screen.
CHAPTER 81
That Strain Agen,
It Had a Dying fall
On the last day of 1607, Edmund Shakespeare was buried. It was a time of almost unbearable cold. By the middle of December the Thames had frozen solid so that “many persons did walk halfway over the Thames upon the ice, and by the thirtieth of December the multitude … passed over the Thames in divers places.”1 A small tent city sprang up on the ice, with wrestling bouts and football matches, barbers’ shops and eating-houses, trading upon the novelty of the silent and immobile river.
On 31 December Edmund Shakespeare was carried to the church on the southern bank of the Thames. The entry in the burial register of St. Saviour’s reads: “1607 December 31 Edmond Shakespeare, a player, in the Church.” And then a note by the sexton runs: “1607 December 31 Edmund Shakespeare, a player, buried in the church with a forenoon knell of the great bell, 20s.” The money for the bell no doubt came from the purse of his brother, who in the bitter cold accompanied the coffin to the burial place. It is possible, probable even, that Edmund died of the plague. He had followed his infant son within six months.
And then, in the spring of 1608, an entry in the Stationers’ Register records a play that, unlike Antony and Cleopatra, became hugely popular in Shakespeare’s lifetime. In the published version of 1609 Pericles is identified as “diuers and sundry times acted by his Maiesties Seruants at the Globe on the Banck-side.” So it must have been played at that theatre in the spring of the previous year, since the theatres were subsequently closed for eighteen months. The Venetian Ambassador took the French Ambassador to a performance, and a Venetian contemporary noted that “All the ambassadors who have come to England have gone to the play.”2 One versifier compared large London crowds “of gentles mixed with grooms”3 with those who swarmed to see Pericles. Its edition in quarto was reprinted five times. It was quoted incessantly, and had the distinction of being dismissed by Ben Jonson as a “mouldy tale.”4 It was, of course, more successful than anything Jonson himself had ever written.
There is some disagreement over the form and nature of Pericles as well as the other late plays which share an abiding interest in music and spectacle. A convenient term is that of romance, since in this period there was a revival of what might be described as the cult of romance. The king’s oldest son, Henry, was being compared with the legendary Arthur; this in turn inspired a new fashion for chivalry and legendary adventure on the pattern of Malory and Spenser. This was not of course a sufficient condition for the creation of Pericles, but it is a contributing factor. There was also a tradition of stage plays taken from medieval gestes, but the medieval context of Pericles is wider than that of knights and battles.
It is often suggested that Shakespeare had entered an “experimental” phase with Pericles and subsequent plays, but he himself would not have recognised or understood the term. It would also be a mistake to impose upon him principles or standards which a later generation would describe as “aesthetic.” He did not have an aesthetic view of the drama at all, but a practical and empirical one. Pericles is an example. It is a play of extremities, of foul and fair closely joined. The most lubricious and bawdy prose is placed beside some of Shakespeare’s most plangent verse, so that all seems to cohere as if by miracle. The great dirge to the sea deeps gives way to an image of prostitutes that “with continuall action, are euen as good as rotten”(1532-3).
The play attests in particular to Shakespeare’s long affection for the religious plays of his childhood. The last mystery cycle was played in Coventry as late as 1579, well within the purview of the young Shakespeare. It is not necessary that he should have seen the mystery plays—although in the course of a Stratford boyhood it is likely that he did—only that he should have come from a culture in which they played a central role. They were part of the spirit of place.
Such paradigmatic events as “the Agony” and “the Betrayal” are redeployed in a number of Shakespeare’s plays, and Pericles in particular inhabits a world of vision and of supernatural intervention, where the spiritualised hero must endure much suffering before being blessed. The visitation of the goddess Diana here replaces the more usual appearance of the Virgin Mary, but the meaning is the same. Indeed the play of St. Mary Magdalene to be found in the Digby Manuscript bears many parallels with Shakespeare’s drama, including the birth of a child at sea during a storm, and the miraculous restoration of the unhappy mother. It is a matter of record that the Catholic players who had performed in the recusant households of Yorkshire included Pericles in their repertoire, and that the play was also included in a booklist belonging to the English Jesuit College at St. Omer in France.5 It must have been deeply congenial to the adherents of the old religion.
Shakespeare seems deliberately to re-create the tone and atmosphere of the early medieval romances, too, on the very good and practical grounds that they could still have a startling effect upon their spectators. Longinus wrote of the Odyssey, “Homer shows that, as genius ebbs, it is the love of romance that characterises old age.”6 The Shakespearian romances may be an indication of advancing age but not of ebbing inspiration. His late plays are unique in the history of Elizabethan drama. With their combination of music, spectacle and vision, they fulfil all the conditions of older drama while at the same time providing a wholly contemporaneous interest in narrative and adventure. The medieval atmosphere of Pericles is in fact deliberately created with the appearance of the fourteenth-century poet John Gower as Chorus, at the beginning of every act. Gower’s Chorus lends the play the form of ritual, exactly the effect that was intended. Ritual is another element involved in the enchanted atmosphere of romance.
After Shakespeare’s death his fellow actors excluded Pericles from the Folio edition of his works in 1623. They seem to have taken the view that it was in part a collaboration and therefore did not fit an attribution to William Shakespeare. Most historians and textual scholars agree that much of the play was written by a second playwright, but there are also scenes and passages that are undoubtedly and authentically composed by Shakespeare. The identity of the second dramatist has been a matter of speculation, but one candidate emerges above all others. At some point in 1608 a playwright in his mid-thirties, George Wilkins, published a novelisation of the play entitled The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. The novel is so close to the play, and is so intimate with its structure, that it has generally been agreed that Wilkins himself collaborated with Shakespeare in the composition of the drama. Wilkins was writing his novel from memory, his “foul papers” being now in the possession of the King’s Men, and it is likely that the play proved so popular in the spring months of 1608 that Wilkins rushed into publication during the period when the playhouses were closed once more.
In the years between 1604 and 1608 Wilkins wrote other works of a popular nature, among them plays and prose narratives. The King’s Men had performed his The Miseries of Inforst Mariage in the year before, so the connection between him and Shakespeare was already there. Wilkins wrote the first sections of Pericles, and parts of the other acts, while Shakespeare wrote the rest. It should also be noted here, given the fact that Pericles has often been considered to be a “Catholic” play, that Wilkins himself adhered to the old faith.
It might be wondered why the older and much more famous dramatist would condescend to work with a tyro. But Shakespeare was a man of the theatre. He was competent and practical, no doubt ready to work with anyone for the good of the company. It is not at all likely that the collaborators sat down together with their principal sources, Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Laurence Twine’s The Patterne of Painefulle Aduentures, before sharing out the plot of Pericles. It is much more likely that Wilkins suggested the idea of the play and himself devised the plot. His earlier venture with the King’s Men had been relatively successful, and he was already trying his hand at prose romances. The company might have considered him to be a promising dramatist. After essaying a first version of Pericles, however, he may have discovered himself to be unequal to the task. He may have been in trouble with the authorities, or even briefly imprisoned. He may simply have run out of invention. So the work was handed to Shakespeare for completion. Shakespeare could on occasions act as a superior “play doctor” bringing together all the themes and strands of a plot. His imagination seems, in fact, to have been quickened by the last sections of Pericles, in which the restoration of Marina and the resolution of family loss are the important motifs. He added significantly to these scenes, and tended to leave the earlier stage business as it was. Since the play was extraordinarily popular, he made the right decision.
The prospect of Wilkins being arrested or imprisoned is no biographical fantasy. George Wilkins was a tavern-keeper and brothel-owner whose establishment was on the corner of Turnmill Street and Cow Cross Street. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the site is still that of a flourishing public house. Wilkins had a reputation for violence and was regularly cited in the proceedings of Middlesex sessions court, particularly for assaults against the young female prostitutes whom he employed. He was accused, for example, of “kikkinge a woman on the Belly which was then greate with childe.”7 One of the guarantors of Wilkins on this occasion was Henry Gosson, of St. Lawrence Pountney; it was Gosson who issued the play of Pericles in quarto form. It seems probable that Wilkins obtained the play for him from the King’s Men. Since he had written much of it, he may have had some claim to proprietorship. It might be added that, at a later date, Wilkins was convicted of being a thief and of harbouring criminals in his inn.
Shakespeare may also have been acquainted with Wilkins’s father, a poet and well-known Londoner, who had died of the plague five years before. But it is also likely that Shakespeare encountered Wilkins through the agency of the Mountjoys; when the daughter of the house married one of the apprentices, Stephen Belott, the young couple became tenants of Wilkins at his inn on the corner of Turnmill Street. Belott himself had been well acquainted with Wilkins, and had eaten meals at his establishment. It was the most notorious of all London quarters, filled with brothels and cheap taverns, but it was also one of the most interesting. This was the world in which Shakespeare encountered his collaborator. It is not unusual to find Shakespeare in what might be called “low” company—he has been discovered before with the landladies of Southwark in an affray—and it is not even occasion for surprise. Even when wealthy and successful, he fitted himself to any kind of society.
PART IX
Blackfriars
Ben Jonson’s Oberon, the Fairy Prince (1611): designs by Inigo Jones. The style and staging of plays changed with the move to “indoors” theatres such as Blackfriars.
CHAPTER 82
As in a Theatre the Eies of Men
Since the doors of the playhouses were shut for eighteen months, from the summer of 1608, it may seem a strange time for the King’s Men to be engaged in a very expensive theatrical speculation. Nevertheless at the beginning of August 1608, just when the theatres had closed down, Shakespeare and six of his colleagues leased the Blackfriars Theatre for a period of twenty-one years. The Children of the Chapel Royal had been disbanded, after a particularly contentious production that had scandalised the French Ambassador, and so their venue was available for hire.
