Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Shakespeare had never heard anything quite like this before—certainly not in the morality plays or mystery cycles he had watched back in Warwickshire. He must have said to himself something like, “You are not in Stratford anymore.” To someone raised on a diet of moralities and mysteries, it must have seemed as if the figure of Riot had somehow seized control of the stage, and with it an unparalleled power of language. Perhaps, at one of those early performances—before the full extent of Marlowe’s recklessness became known—Shakespeare waited, with others in the audience, for the tyrant, soaked with the blood of innocents, to be brought low. That, after all, is what always happened to Riot or to Herod in the religious drama. But what he saw instead was one insanely cruel victory follow another, the rhetoric of triumph becoming ever more intoxicating. “Millions of souls sit on the banks of Styx,” exults the murderous conqueror at the play’s close,
Waiting the back return of Charon’s boat.
Hell and Elysium swarm with ghosts of men
That I have sent. . . .
(5.1.463–66)
Nothing holds Tamburlaine back, no fear, no deference, no respect for the established order of things: “Emperors and kings lie breathless at my feet” (5.1.469). With these words and with the slaughter of the innocent virgins of Damascus, he takes his beautiful bride, the divine Zenocrate, daughter of the conquered sultan of Egypt. Then, shockingly, outrageously, the play was over, and the crowd applauded, cheering the trampling of everything that they had been instructed with numbing repetition to hold dear.
This was a crucial experience for Shakespeare, a challenge to all of his aesthetic and moral and professional assumptions. The challenge must have been intensified when he learned that Marlowe was in effect his double: born in the same year, 1564, in a provincial town; the son not of a wealthy gentleman but of a common artisan, a shoemaker. Had Marlowe not existed, Shakespeare would no doubt have written plays, but those plays would have been decisively different. As it is, he gives the impression that he made the key move in his career—the decision not to make his living as an actor alone but to try also to write for the stage on which he performed—under Marlowe’s influence. The fingerprints of Tamburlaine (both the initial play and the sequel that soon followed) are all over the plays that are among Shakespeare’s earliest known ventures as a playwright, the three parts of Henry VI—so much so that earlier textual scholars thought that the Henry VI plays must have been collaborative enterprises undertaken with Marlowe himself. The decided unevenness in the style of the plays suggests that Shakespeare may well have been working with others, though few scholars any longer believe that Marlowe was among them. Rather, the neophyte Shakespeare and his collaborators seem to have been looking over their shoulders at Marlowe’s achievement.
Marlowe had put together the two parts of Tamburlaine out of his strange personal history—spy, double agent, counterfeiter, atheist—but also and as important, out of his voraciously wide reading. Some of the details of the life of the Scythian conqueror he could have culled from popular English books, but scholars have shown that Marlowe must have followed the leads in these books back to other, less readily available sources in Latin. Some of the details in Tamburlaine suggest that Marlowe even picked up information found in Turkish sources not yet translated during the playwright’s lifetime into any Western European languages. And crucially, for these plays full of exotic geographical locations, he had access to the recent and very expensive Theatrum orbis terrarum by the great Flemish geographer Ortelius. Where could a shoemaker’s son find access to this and all the rest? The explanation must lie in the bibliographical and human resources of Cambridge University, where Marlowe enrolled as a student in 1581. In July of that year, for example, a copy of Ortelius’s atlas was presented to the university library, and Marlowe’s own college, Corpus Christi, already owned a copy.
Shakespeare had no comparable resources upon which he could draw. But he did have a friend in London who probably played a crucial role at this point in his career. Richard Field had come to London in 1578 from Stratford-upon-Avon, where his father and Shakespeare’s father were associates, to serve as an apprentice to the printer Thomas Vautrollier, a Protestant refugee from Paris. Vautrollier had a good business: he published schoolbooks, an edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, a Latin Book of Common Prayer, works in French, and editions of important classics. Thus described, the list sounds rather dull, but Vautrollier also allowed himself to take certain risks, such as bringing out important works by the heretical theologian and radical Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (who was later burned at the stake in Rome). And among his best-known publications was a book that turned out to be one of Shakespeare’s favorites: Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, a principal source for Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, and, above all, Antony and Cleopatra.
Richard Field did well for himself in his new calling: after serving for six years as Vautrollier’s apprentice and for a seventh year as the apprentice of another printer, in 1587 he obtained admission to the printers’ guild, the Stationer’s Company. When, in that same year, Vautrollier died, Field married his widow, Jacqueline, and took over the business. By 1589, then, he was established as a master printer, with a busy workshop and an impressive, wide-ranging, and intellectually challenging list of authors. He must also have owned books by his competitors and would have had access to others. He was a hugely valuable resource for his young playwright friend from Stratford.
Even though as a poet Shakespeare dreamed of eternal fame, he does not seem to have associated that fame with the phenomenon of the printed book. And even when he was well established as a playwright, with his plays for sale in the bookstalls in St. Paul’s Churchyard, he showed little or no personal interest in seeing his plays on the printed page, let alone assuring the accuracy of the editions. He never, it seems, anticipated what turned out to be the case: that he would live as much on the page as on the stage and that his destiny as a writer was deeply bound up with the technology he must have glimpsed the first time he visited his friend’s printing shop in Blackfriars.
When the door opened, Shakespeare would have seen firsthand the beating heart of the London book trade: the compositor bending over the manuscripts, reaching into the trays, pulling out the bits of type and setting them in the rows; the printer inking the completed “formes,” or frames in which the printing type was secured, and turning the great screws that pressed the inked formes down onto the mechanical bed on which large sheets of paper were laid; the printing press casting off the sheets which were then folded to make the pages; the proofreader correcting the sheets and going back to the compositor for changes before the pages were taken to the binders to be stitched together. All of this would have been interesting enough in itself as a spectacle (there are many images in Shakespeare’s work of the imprinting of marks or signs), but the real excitement for him would have been access to books. Books were expensive, far too expensive for a young actor and untried playwright to buy out of his own pocket, and yet the ambitious Shakespeare needed them if he was to rise to the challenge posed by Marlowe’s stupendous work.
How Shakespeare came to the idea of writing his counterthrust to Tamburlaine—the three plays about the troubled fifteenth-century reign of Henry VI—is not known. Perhaps the idea was not originally his: there is evidence that the Queen’s Men, with which he may have been affiliated at the time, was troubled by Marlowe’s success and determined to counter it. Shakespeare may have been invited to join in a project already under way that had bogged down. Plays were often written collaboratively, and the more established writers may have welcomed another hand. Perhaps he began by making a few small suggestions and then found himself increasingly involved and responsible. Alternatively, he may have been in charge from the beginning. But whatever the case, he and any collaborators he had needed books, as Marlowe had needed books. The key books—English chronicles such as Edward Hall’s The Union of t
he Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, A Mirror for Magistrates by Willam Baldwin and others, and, above all, Raphael Holinshed’s indispensable and just-published Chronicles—were not published by Field or his former master Vautrollier, but it is quite possible that Shakespeare’s friend may have owned copies or been able to put him in touch with those who did.
Shakespeare had determined to write a historical epic, like Marlowe’s, but to make it an English epic, an account of the bloody time of troubles that preceded the order brought by the Tudors. He wanted to resurrect a whole world, as Marlowe had done, bringing forth astonishing larger-than-life figures engaged in struggles to the death, but it was now not the exotic realms of the East that would be brought to the stage but England’s own past. The great idea of the history play—taking the audience back into a time that had dropped away from living memory but that was still eerily familiar and crucially important—was not absolutely new, but Shakespeare gave it an energy, power, and conviction that it had never before possessed. The Henry VI plays are still crude, especially in comparison with Shakespeare’s later triumphs in the same genre, but they convey a striking picture of the playwright poring over Holinshed’s Chronicles in search of materials that would enable him to imitate Tamburlaine.
The imitation, though real enough, is not exactly an expression of homage; it is a skeptical reply. Marlowe’s play concentrated all of the world’s driving ambition in a single charismatic superhero; Shakespeare’s trilogy is full of Tamburlaine-like grotesques, including one already encountered, the peasant Jack Cade. Cade turns out to be the unwitting puppet of the power-crazed Duke of York, who echoes Tamburlaine’s boast:
I will stir up in England some black storm
Shall blow ten thousand souls to heaven or hell,
And this fell tempest shall not cease to rage
Until the golden circuit on my head
Like to the glorious sun’s transparent beams
Do calm the fury of this mad-bred flaw.
(2 Henry VI, 3.1.349–54)
The Marlovian accents are still clearer in the speeches of York’s evil son, Richard:
How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown,
Within whose circuit is Elysium
And all that poets feign of bliss and joy.
(3 Henry VI, 1.2.29–31)
And the sadistic pleasure is no longer limited to the male world; it extends to the formidable Queen Margaret, triumphing over her enemy York:
Why art thou patient, man? Thou shouldst be mad,
And I, to make thee mad, do mock thee thus.
Stamp, rave, and fret, that I may sing and dance.
(3 Henry VI, 1.4.90–92)
This savage cruelty in a woman astonishes even the fierce York: “O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!” he exclaims (1.4.138). When order breaks down, everyone wants to be a Tamburlaine.
In Marlowe’s vision of the exotic East, vaunting ambition, stopping at nothing, leads to the establishment of a grand world order, cruel but magnificent. That order, as part two of Tamburlaine shows, crumbles, but only because everything eventually crumbles: there is no moral other than the brute fact of mortality. In Shakespeare’s vision of English history, vaunting ambition leads to chaos, an ungovernable, murderous factionalism and the consequent loss of power at home and abroad. Despite or even because of his ruthlessness, Marlowe’s hero bestrides the world like a god, doing whatever it pleases him to do—“This is my mind, and I will have it so” (4.2.91). By contrast, Shakespeare’s petty Tamburlaines, even though they are queens and dukes, are like mentally unbalanced small-town criminals: they are capable of incredible nastiness but cannot achieve a hint of grandeur.
In part, this limitation was a consequence of poetic inexperience: Shakespeare was not able, at least at this point in his life, to match the unstoppable, monomaniacal grandiloquence Marlowe commanded. But in part it was a clear choice: Shakespeare refused to give any of his characters, even his stalwart English military hero Talbot, the limitless power Marlowe gleefully conferred on Tamburlaine. Simply to look at Tamburlaine is to see the embodiment of Herculean power; to look on Talbot, by contrast, is to be disappointed. “I see report is fabulous and false,” says the Countess of Auvergne, who has lured Talbot to her castle.
It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp
Should strike such terror to his enemies.
(1 Henry VI, 2.3.17, 22–3)
Talbot is an ordinary mortal. When the English forces are routed, he is killed, along with his son, by a French army led by the demonic Joan of Arc. No one in this world is invincible: abandoned by her devils, Joan is soon afterward captured by the resurgent English army, tried for sorcery, and burned at the stake.
Crowds flocked in the late 1580s to see the Henry VI plays—this was Shakespeare’s first great theatrical success, establishing him as a viable playwright—but they did not come to fantasize about possessing absolute power. On the contrary, they came to shudder at the horrors of popular uprising and civil war. The crowds came too, it seems, to savor heroic sacrifice and to mourn loss. “How it would have joyed brave Talbot,” wrote a contemporary playwright, Thomas Nashe, “to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his Tomb, he should triumph again on the Stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.” Nashe, who may have been one of Shakespeare’s collaborators on 1 Henry VI, was not an objective witness. But even if he was exaggerating, he was pointing to a major commercial triumph. Edward Alleyn had found a rival in the “Tragedian” who played Talbot—in all likelihood, Richard Burbage; and the visionary poetic genius of Christopher Marlowe had been challenged from a hitherto unknown talent, a minor actor from Stratford-upon-Avon.
CHAPTER 7
Shakescene
IF BEFORE HIS success with the Henry VI plays Shakespeare had not already met Marlowe, he would certainly have met him soon afterward, and along with Marlowe he would have met many of the other playwrights—poets, as they were then called—who were writing for the London stage. They were an extraordinary group, of the kind that emerges all at once in charmed moments, as when a dozen or more brilliant painters all seemed to converge at the same time on Florence or when for years at a time New Orleans or Chicago seemed to have a seemingly limitless supply of stupendous jazz and blues musicians. In all such moments, of course, sheer genetic accident is at work, but there are always institutional and cultural circumstances that help the accident make sense. In late-sixteenth-century London those circumstances included the phenomenal growth of the urban population, the emergence of the public theaters, and the existence of a competitive market for new plays. They included too an impressive, widespread growth in literacy; an educational system that trained its students to be highly sensitive to rhetorical effects; a social and political taste for elaborate display; a religious culture that compelled parishioners to listen to long, complex sermons; and a vibrant, restless intellectual culture. There were very few options for promising intellectuals: the educational system had surged ahead of the existing social system, so that highly educated men who did not want to pursue a career in the church or law had to cast about for something to do with themselves. Disreputable though it was, the theater beckoned.
At some moment in the late 1580s, Shakespeare walked into a room—most likely, in an inn in Shoreditch, Southwark, or the Bankside—and quite possibly found many of the leading writers drinking and eating together: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Watson, Thomas Lodge, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Robert Greene. Other playwrights might have been there as well—Thomas Kyd, for example, or John Lyly, but Lyly, born in 1554, was substantially older than the rest, and Kyd, though he subsequently shared a room with Marlowe, seems to have been held at a distance by the group as a whole. For despite his success as a playwright, Kyd made enough
to live on by plodding away as a mere scrivener, a professional penman who copied out texts, and the most stylish writers held such humble occupations in disdain. The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.
For Marlowe, at least, the marginality of the playhouse may have been part of the pleasure. He led a notoriously risk-taking life. But he had only an extreme case of a restless, risk-taking streak present in many of those who responded to the lure of the theater. One of Marlowe’s closest friends, London-born Thomas Watson, had studied at Oxford but left without a degree, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, to travel and study on the Continent, learning, as he put it, “to utter words of diverse sound.” He returned to London ostensibly to study law, though he also seems to have been engaged in duplicitous, high-stakes games, somewhere between espionage and extortion. At the same time he threw himself into the literary scene, where he quickly emerged as one of its most learned figures, publishing by the time he was twenty-four years old a Latin translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, composing original Latin poetry, translating Petrarch and Tasso into Latin hexameters, and experimenting in English for the first time since Wyatt and Surrey with the fashionable Continental form, the sonnet.
Somehow in this hectic life Watson also found time to write plays in English for the popular stage. Surveying the theater in the late 1590s, Francis Meres ranked Watson with Peele, Marlowe, and Shakespeare as “the best for tragedy”; more sourly, an antagonist, accusing him of fraud, declared that he “could devise twenty fictions and knaveries in a play which was his daily practice and his living.” None of these plays survives, and Watson is now best known as the friend who intervened in a street brawl between Marlowe and an innkeeper’s son named William Bradley. The brawl, on Hog Lane, near the Theater and the Curtain, ended with Watson’s sword stuck six inches into Bradley’s chest. Watson and Marlowe were both arrested on suspicion of murder but were eventually released, on grounds of self-defense.