Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

  When Shakespeare came to London, he had seen and acted in plays, but he had never before seen a freestanding playhouse. Probably it had already been described to him in detail, perhaps carefully sketched by a family member who had been to London or by a friend, but there was a moment when he set foot in one for the first time. He saw a rectangular elevated platform, jutting out into the middle of a large yard surrounded by tiered galleries. The yard, for the “groundlings” to stand and watch the play, was open to the elements, but the stage was covered by a painted canopy—known as “the heavens”—supported by two columns. The stage, five feet above the ground, had no protective railings—an actor in the midst of a sword fight had to keep a sharp sense of where he was. Set into the stage was a trapdoor that led to a storage space known as “hell,” which could be used to powerful theatrical effect. At the back of the stage was a wooden wall with two doors, for entrances and exits, and between them, in some theaters, a central curtained space that could be opened for formal entrances or for more intimate scenes. Above these doors on the back wall ran a gallery partitioned into rooms for the highest-paying spectators. The central part of this gallery could be used for staging scenes: if not at once then very soon after, Shakespeare began to imagine the ways he might use that space, say, as a balcony or the high parapet of a castle wall.

  With no lighting and nothing more than minimal scenery, there would have been little scope for creating the types of illusions routinely used by modern theaters, but audiences have proved again and again that they do not need to be plunged into darkness in order to imagine the night or to see papier-mâché trees in order to conjure up a forest. What Elizabethan audiences did take seriously was the illusionistic effect of clothes; behind the back wall of the stage was a “tiring house,” where the actors could don their elaborate costumes, costumes that were carefully protected from the rain by the overhanging canopy. The whole design was wonderfully functional and flexible. The handsome guildhalls and the private halls of the nobility and gentry in which the touring companies performed had their advantages, but the actors had constantly to rethink the show, altering the blocking to fit each different space and working around features that were never intended to accommodate performances. Any young actor or aspiring playwright up from the provinces must have felt on entering a London playhouse that he had died and gone to theatrical heaven.

  That heaven had the agreeable quality of looking at least in certain respects reassuringly familiar. An open space, surrounded by galleries, was reminiscent of the innyards in London and throughout the country where plays were occasionally performed in the open air. (More often they were performed in large rooms.) The innkeepers—or housekeepers, as they were called in this period—rented space, along with costumes and props, to itinerant players who would, at the end of the performance, pass the hat among the crowd. By the time he reached London young Will may have collected the pennies himself more than once, though the companies in the 1580s had also begun to experiment with charging for admission at the inn door. The new Theater and the other public theaters that were built in its wake were run on different principles, but the proprietors similarly called themselves housekeepers, as if they simply owned an inn (presumably, this is why we still speak of dimming the “houselights” or of playing to a “full house”).

  Burbage and Brayne’s investment, in fact, included an inn, the Cross Keys on Gracechurch Street (near what is now Liverpool Street Station), where players on occasion also performed, but their principal theater was a separate structure, enabling the entrepreneurs fully to implement the new idea: the spectators would have to pay at the door, before they saw the show. At the end of the play the actors would only beg for applause and urge return visits. Thus was the box office—originally a locked cashbox—born. The innovation—significantly changing the relationship between the entertainers and their customers—must have been an immediate commercial success, since another theater, the Curtain, soon went up in the same neighborhood, and other theaters soon followed. One penny would get you into the yard where you could stand for the two or three hours with the crowd, milling about, buying apples, oranges, nuts, and bottled ale, or pushing in as close as you could get to the edge of the stage. Another penny would get you out of the rain (or on occasion the hot sun) and onto a seat in one of the covered galleries that ringed the playhouse; a third penny would get you a cushioned seat in one of the “gentlemen’s rooms” on the lower level of the galleries, “the pleasantest place,” as a theatergoer of the time put it, “where [one] not only sees everything well but can also be seen.”

  The system of payment was meant in part to ensure some financial transparency: the first penny was supposed to go to the players; the second and third pennies in whole or in part to the “housekeepers.” But the partners soon fell out—Burbage, Brayne alleged, had been filching money from the cash-box to which he had a secret key—and they did what Elizabethans with any money at stake constantly did: they went to court. Even after Brayne’s death in 1586, the charges and countercharges had not been settled. On the contrary, they grew more tangled and bitter, culminating in a pitched battle on November 16, 1590, when Brayne’s widow came with her allies to the Theater to attempt to collect a share of the receipts. Leaning out of a window, James Burbage and his wife shouted that their sister-in-law was a whore and the collectors knaves. Their youngest son, Richard, then in his early twenties, lay about him with a broomstick and assaulted one of the collectors, “scornfully and disdainfully,” as the deposition puts it, “playing with this deponent’s nose.” This rowdy youth with the broomstick is the first recorded glimpse of the celebrated actor who subsequently played Hamlet and most of the other great Shakespearean heroes.

  The theatrical world Shakespeare found his way into was volatile, speculative, competitive, and precarious. The stage had vociferous enemies: the theaters, preachers and moralists charged, were temples to Venus and other devilish pagan deities; respectable matrons who went innocently enough to watch the plays were quickly lured into lives of licentiousness; men were sexually aroused by seductive boy actors; the Word of God was mocked and piety held up to ridicule; grave authorities were brought into contempt; seditious ideas were planted in the minds of the multitude. Go to plays, thundered one irate minister, John Northbrooke, “if you will learn how to be false and deceive your husbands, or husbands their wives, how to play the harlots to obtain one’s love, how to ravish, how to beguile, how to betray, to flatter, lie, swear, forswear, how to allure to whoredom, how to murder, how to poison, how to disobey and rebel against princes, to consume treasures prodigally, to move to lusts, to ransack and spoil cities and towns, to be idle, to blaspheme, to sing filthy songs of love, to speak filthily, to be proud. . . .” The catalog of vicious lessons continues breathlessly, to be augmented over the years by many other preachers. And as if this were not enough, the wickedness on stage, the theater’s enemies complained, was matched by the wickedness of the audience. At our playhouses, wrote Stephen Gosson in 1579, “you shall see such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by the women; such care for their garments, that they be not trod on; such eyes to their laps, that no chips light in them; such pillows to their backs, that they take no hurt; such masking in their ears, I know not what; such giving them pippins, to pass the time; such playing at foot saunt [i.e., footsie] . . .; such ticking, such toying, such smiling, such winking, and such manning them home, when the sports are ended.” It is a terrible thing, moralists sourly observed, that many who sit happily for two hours to watch a play cannot bear to sit for an hour to hear a sermon.

  These charges were leveled in the name of closing down the theaters, but apart from leading to a ban on Sunday performances, they principally served, not surprisingly, to intensify the public’s interest. “Where shall we go?” wrote John Florio, in an English-Italian phrase book that he published in 1578. “To a play at the Bull, or else to some other place.” Florio was born and brought up in London, the son
of refugee Italian Protestants. His little language lesson—revealing, as those in modern textbooks are, precisely because it was attempting to be so ordinary and everyday—continued:

  Do comedies like you well?

  Yea sir, on holy days.

  They please me also well, but the preachers will not allow them.

  Wherefore? Know you it?

  They say, they are not good.

  And wherefore are they used?

  Because every man delights in them.

  “Because every man delights in them”: defenders of the stage marshaled many arguments—plays showed virtue rewarded and vice punished, taught good manners, kept minds that might otherwise be plotting mischief occupied with harmless things, and so forth—but the theaters survived and flourished simply because people ranging from lowly apprentices to the queen enjoyed what they saw.

  Powerful aristocrats, key government officials, and the queen herself protected the public theaters and the playing companies. If there was a dangerous, subversive force in the realm, they thought, it was not the theaters but the theaters’ enemies, the discontented, tirelessly meddlesome Protestant radicals who wanted to sweep away all profane pleasures. But the protection that the queen and her advisers afforded the stage was by no means unconditional; they too were nervous about public assemblies. They behaved, whether from paranoia or from bitter practical experience, as if crowds were inherently dangerous, as if they could easily turn violent, as if, given the chance, they would attack their social superiors and strike at the fundamental institutions of the society. Though official documents always stressed the queen’s serene confidence in her loving subjects, many of her less guarded remarks suggest a strong current of suspicion. When Sir Philip Sidney had a shoving match with his social superior, the Earl of Oxford, over a tennis court, Elizabeth gave Sidney a lecture on the difference between an earl and a mere knight, along with a warning: Can you imagine, she asked, what would happen if common people learned that you yourself did not respect rank and title?

  Elizabethan officials worried about any public spectacle that they could not control. Even the gathering together of a handful of people could alarm the authorities. Spies were assigned to taverns and inns to listen into conversations and report anything suspicious. Proclamations were issued asking people to be on the watch for anyone speaking “undutiful words.” The government issued warnings against people who “lie privily in corners and bad houses, listening after news and stirs, and spreading rumors and tales.” Vagabonds lurking in London were subject to harsh punishments. Small wonder that the position of the theaters, even with its powerful friends, was precarious.

  Arriving in London in the late 1580s, probably as a hired actor in a troupe of players, Shakespeare entered a relatively new scene, not so new that its basic outlines were unformed but new enough that it was still open and evolving. The playing companies had been accustomed to a nomadic life of almost perpetual touring, with their membership frequently shifting, temporarily splitting apart, and recombining. The rise of the public theaters in a city with a rapidly expanding population hungry for amusement gave at least some of these companies the opportunity to have a lucrative home base where they would do most of their performing. They would still go out on the road from time to time, but the wagon with the costumes and props, the scrambling to find a place to perform, the fraught negotiations with the local authorities would no longer occupy the center of their professional lives.

  But even for the most successful companies the transition to a more settled London-centered existence was not easy. Touring was no doubt tiring—after a handful of performances, the troupe would have to pack up and move on—but the actors could get by with a modest repertory. Not so in London. The open amphitheaters were large—they could hold two thousand or more—and the city, though populous by sixteenth-century standards, was only two hundred thousand. This meant that to survive economically it was not enough to mount one or two successful plays a season and keep them up for reasonable runs. The companies had to induce people, large numbers of people, to get in the habit of coming to the theater again and again, and this meant a constantly changing repertoire, as many as five or six plays per week. The sheer magnitude of the enterprise is astonishing: for each company, approximately twenty new plays per year in addition to some twenty plays carried over from previous seasons.

  Shakespeare seems to have grasped quickly the special opportunity that the burgeoning public theaters had created. The companies that performed in them had an enormous appetite for new plays. He could help to satisfy this appetite, either on his own or in collaboration with others. His timing could not have been better. There was no writers’ guild, no special credentials that he needed to possess, no prerequisites for venturing forth. London would enable him to realize the embryonic ambition to write as well as to act that he may have brought with him from Stratford.

  Later in his life it was said that Shakespeare wrote with astonishing facility. “The Players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare,” his friend and rival Ben Jonson wrote, “that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out line.” “My answer hath been,” Jonson tartly added, “would he had blotted a thousand.” Judging from the multiple versions that exist of many of his plays and poems, Shakespeare in fact must have quietly blotted thousands of lines. There is powerful evidence that he extensively revised his work. Yet the impression of a great ease in writing remains and may have extended back even to his early efforts. Words came easily to him, he was a quick study, and he had already absorbed several richly suggestive theatrical models. Though young and untried, he was poised to begin writing for the stage at once. Nonetheless, there are signs that it took a startling aesthetic shock to set Shakespeare’s career as a writer fully in motion.

  London, the chronicler Stow wrote, “was a mighty arm and instrument to bring any great desire to effect.” The great public theaters that went up from the 1570s onward—the Theater, the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Globe, the Red Bull, the Fortune, and the Hope—were in the business of fostering and catering to such great desires. Shakespeare encountered this central principle in its purest form almost immediately upon his arrival, for in 1587, just at the time he was finding his feet in London, crowds were flocking to the Rose to see the Lord Admiral’s Men perform Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Shakespeare almost certainly saw the play (along with the sequel that shortly followed), and he probably went back again and again. It may indeed have been one of the first performances he ever saw in a playhouse—perhaps the first—and, from its effect upon his early work, it appears to have had upon him an intense, visceral, indeed life-transforming impact.

  The dream that Marlowe’s startlingly cruel play aroused and brilliantly gratified was the dream of domination. His hero is a poor Scythian shepherd who rises by determination, charismatic energy, and utter ruthlessness to conquer much of the known world. The play, conceived on an epic scale, is full of noise, exotic pageantry, and rivers of stage blood—flags fly, chariots are dragged across the stage, cannons are fired—but the core of its appeal is its incantatory celebration of the will to power:

  Nature, that framed us of four elements,

  Warring within our breasts for regiment,

  Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

  Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

  The wondrous architecture of the world

  And measure every wand’ring planet’s course,

  Still climbing after knowledge infinite

  And always moving as the restless spheres,

  Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest

  Until we reach the ripest fruit of all:

  That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

  The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

  (2.7.18–29)

  For the space of this play, all of the moral rules inculcated in schools and churches, in homilies and proclamations and sober-minded tracts, are suspended. The highest
good—“That perfect bliss and sole felicity”—is not the contemplation of God but the possession of a crown. There is no hierarchy of blood, no divinely sanctioned legitimate authority, no inherited obligation to obey, no moral restraint. Instead, there is a restless, violent striving that can be fully appeased only by grasping (or dreaming of grasping) supreme power.

  The part of Tamburlaine was created by an astonishingly gifted young actor in the Lord Admiral’s Men, Edward Alleyn, at the time only twenty-one years old. At the sight of the performance, Shakespeare, two years his senior, may have grasped, if he had not already begun to do so, that he was not likely to become one of the leading actors on the London stage. Alleyn was the real thing: a majestic physical presence, with a “well-tuned,” clear voice capable of seizing and holding the attention of enormous audiences. Achieving instant and enduring fame for his “stalking and roaring” in the part, Alleyn went on to play Faustus, Barabas, and many other great roles; to marry Henslowe’s step-daughter; to become immensely rich from the business side of entertainment; and to found a distinguished educational institution, Dulwich College.

  The actor in Shakespeare would have perceived what was powerful in Alleyn’s interpretation of Tamburlaine, but the poet in him understood something else: the magic that was drawing audiences did not reside entirely in the actor’s fine voice, nor even in the hero’s daring vision of the blissful object at which he lunges, the earthy crown. The hushed crowd was already tasting Tamburlaine’s power in the unprecedented energy and commanding eloquence of the play’s blank verse—the dynamic flow of unrhymed five-stress, ten-syllable lines—that the author, Christopher Marlowe, had mastered for the stage. This verse, like the dream of what ordinary speech would be like were human beings something greater than they are, was by no means only bombast and bragging. Its appeal lay in its own “wondrous architecture”: its subtle rhythms, the way in which a succession of monosyllables suddenly flowers into the word “aspiring,” the pleasure of hearing “fruit” become “fruition.”