Some readers might object to a depiction of William Shakespeare as a man willing to use violence, yet within a year of the fictional events of Fools and Mortals, he was bound over by the Surrey magistrates to keep the peace. The episode is shrouded in mystery, but in November 1596 a man named William Wayte had a Writ of Attachment (similar to a restraining order) issued against William Shakespeare, Francis Langley (of the Swan Playhouse), and two women, Dorothy Soer and Anne Lee. Wayte claimed he was assaulted and feared for his life. Wayte, judging by other surviving documents, was no saint, but the event, mysterious as it is, is a reminder that the playhouses of Tudor and Jacobean London lay in close proximity to the world of criminals and brothels.
Silvia’s talk of a ‘red cross knight’ and the dragon is a reference to Edmund Spenser’s vast, unfinished epic poem, The Faerie Queen. Spenser was distantly related to Elizabeth Spencer, the Baroness Hunsdon, who was married to Sir George Carey, son of the Lord Chamberlain, and the mother of Elizabeth Carey, the bride. Elizabeth Spencer was a noted patroness of the arts, and it is not inconceivable that she would have embraced the first production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with enthusiasm. Emilia, briefly mentioned in Chapter Eleven, was Emilia Lanier, who was Lord Hunsdon’s mistress for many years. Forty-five years younger than the Lord Chamberlain, she was the daughter of an Italian-born court musician. On becoming pregnant with Lord Hunsdon’s child she was pensioned off generously and married to a cousin. Some scholars believe that Emilia Lanier was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
The Reverend John Northbrooke’s diatribe, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes, was published in 1577, not long after the Theatre had been built, and it is one of the earliest Puritan attacks on the playhouses. The excerpts I quote in Chapter Eight have been edited for length, but give the flavour of what was, in the end, a successful campaign to close down London’s theatres. H. L. Mencken’s definition of a Puritan was someone ‘who is haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy’, and the more happiness the playhouses gave, the more virulent the attacks by Puritan preachers. One declared from his pulpit ‘the cause of plagues is sin … and the cause of sin are plays, therefore the cause of plagues are plays.’ In 1594 the Lord Mayor of London, John Spencer, tried to persuade the Privy Council to close all the theatres, describing them as ‘corrupt and profane’, containing nothing but ‘unchaste fables, lascivious devices … and matters of like sort’. He describes the playhouses as ‘places of meeting for all vagrants and masterless men that hang about the city, thieves, horse-stealers, whoremongers, cozeners, coney-catching persons. Practisers of treason and other idle and dangerous persons.’ Parliament’s victory in the English Civil War brought success to this relentless campaign, and, to the delight of the Puritans, the playhouses of London were forcibly shut down in 1642 and remained closed throughout the Interregnum. They reappeared in 1660 with the restoration of the monarchy, and, happily, have been flourishing ever since.
There has been some debate as to whether the playing companies of the late sixteenth century used a director. They certainly did not call him that, the word did not come into common usage until the nineteenth century, but the evidence that one man took responsibility to direct the players and shape the play is contained within the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Peter Quince rehearses the mechanicals for Pyramus and Thisbe, the play within the play, and behaves as a modern director would. He distributes the parts to the actors, draws up a list of props, schedules their rehearsals, and, in Act III, Scene 1, we see one of those rehearsals. He tells the players when to enter or exit, where to go, what to say, and when to say it. ‘Why,’ he says to Francis Flute, ‘you must not speak that yet … You speak all your parts at once, cues and all! Pyramus, enter! Your cue is past, it is “never tire”.’ That is directing! And it is plainly an affectionate portrait of the process by which a play was staged in 1595. Quince, of course, also appears in the play he is directing, which strongly suggests that one of the principal actors served as the director. I have ascribed much of the directing to the fictional Alan Rust, but Shakespeare, as the author of the Theatre’s best plays, must often have taken on the responsibility himself, especially for his own plays.
We owe John Heminges and Henry Condell an unpayable debt, because, seven years after William Shakespeare’s death, they produced the famous book known today as the First Folio. Many of Shakespeare’s plays had already been published as quartos (the names refer to the size of the books – think of a quarto as the size of a paperback, and the folio more like an encyclopaedia), but if we did not have the First Folio we would not have eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays: Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, King John, All’s Well that Ends Well, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, Henry VI Part One, Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Timon of Athens, and Antony and Cleopatra. Scholars have estimated that London’s playhouses performed around 3,000 plays between 1570 and the closure of the theatres in 1642, and of those 3,000 we only have the texts of 230, so it is a miracle that any survive, and even more of a miracle that we have 38 by Shakespeare. The mention of Love’s Labour’s Won in Chapter Six is not an error. It is quite possible that a play of that name existed and, if so, it would be, along with Cardenio, one of the two lost plays of William Shakespeare. Love’s Labour’s Won is first mentioned in 1598, and could either be a lost play or, possibly, the name was an alternative title for another play, perhaps All’s Well that Ends Well, or Much Ado About Nothing.
And were those plays cut? Shakespeare’s plays, if acted in their entirety, are frequently very long, three, or even four hours is not unusual. Yet, in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare himself describes ‘the two hour traffic of our stage’, and I believe the plays were trimmed in rehearsal to run little more than two hours. There would have been no intermission in the Theatre, though there would have been in a candlelit hall to allow the wicks to be trimmed. Purists argue that the whole play should be presented, however long and however obscure some of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century language, and despite the ordeal it inflicts upon the audience. Yet there is strong evidence that the published scripts do not represent the plays as originally performed onstage. That evidence comes from Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, who on the title page of his play Every Man Out of his Humour, published in 1600, specifically says that the printed text is the script ‘as it was first composed by the Author B. J. Containing more than hath been Publikely Spoken or Acted’. The exigencies of time and the experience of rehearsal would surely have cut a play, as indeed still happens.
Some readers may be disappointed that I have nowhere suggested that William Shakespeare was not the author of the plays ascribed to him. The idea that he was insufficiently educated to write the plays has taken hold in some circles, and the argument about ‘who was the real Shakespeare?’ rumbles on. The argument is a nonsense. We have overwhelming evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford was William Shakespeare the playwright. I would refer any reader who wants to examine both the evidence and the arguments to James Shapiro’s excellent book, Contested Will, Who Wrote Shakespeare? (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2010). It is a pity that such a book ever needed to be written, but as Puck says, ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’
I am immensely grateful to Amanda Moore, who compiled an enormous dossier of research into the background of Shakespeare’s world and the playing companies of the 1590s. She has every right to feel aggrieved that so little of that research appears in the novel, but it nevertheless infuses the whole story and was invaluable. All the mistakes that remain are entirely mine.
I am also indebted to Terry Layman, who, when playing Nick Bottom, invented the business of Pyramus forgetting the last word in the sequence ‘Now die, die, die, die, die!’ It worked wonderfully!
In As You Like It, Shakespeare asked, ‘whoever loved that
loved not at first sight?’ In truth he stole the line from Christopher Marlowe’s play Hero and Leander, which is all a convoluted way of saying that although Fools and Mortals is dedicated to the many colleagues who have made my summers so delightful (and terrifying) at the Monomoy Theatre in Chatham, Massachusetts, I am sure none of them will resent sharing it with Judy, my wife, who makes all things possible. To all of them, and especially to Judy, thank you.
About the Author
Bernard Cornwell was born in London, raised in Essex and worked for the BBC for eleven years before meeting Judy, his American wife. Denied an American work permit, he wrote a novel instead and has been writing ever since. He and Judy divide their time between Cape Cod and Charleston, South Carolina.
www.bernardcornwell.net
/bernardcornwell
Also by Bernard Cornwell
The LAST KINGDOM Series
The Last Kingdom
The Pale Horseman
The Lords of the North
Sword Song
The Burning Land
Death of Kings
The Pagan Lord
The Empty Throne
Warriors of the Storm
The Flame Bearer
Azincourt
The GRAIL QUEST Series
Harlequin
Vagabond
Heretic
1356
Stonehenge
The Fort
The STARBUCK Chronicles
Rebel
Copperhead
Battle Flag
The Bloody Ground
The WARLORD Chronicles
The Winter King
The Enemy of God
Excalibur
Gallows Thief
By Bernard Cornwell and Susannah Kells
A Crowning Mercy
Fallen Angels
Non-Fiction
Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles
The SHARPE series
(in chronological order)
Sharpe’s Tiger (1799)
Sharpe’s Triumph (1803)
Sharpe’s Fortress (1803)
Sharpe’s Trafalgar (1805)
Sharpe’s Prey (1807)
Sharpe’s Rifles (1809)
Sharpe’s Havoc (1809)
Sharpe’s Eagle (1809)
Sharpe’s Gold (1810)
Sharpe’s Escape (1811)
Sharpe’s Fury (1811)
Sharpe’s Battle (1811)
Sharpe’s Company (1812)
Sharpe’s Sword (1812)
Sharpe’s Enemy (1812)
Sharpe’s Honour (1813)
Sharpe’s Regiment (1813)
Sharpe’s Siege (1814)
Sharpe’s Revenge (1814)
Sharpe’s Waterloo (1815)
Sharpe’s Devil (1820–1821)
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Bernard Cornwell, Fools and Mortals
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