Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

  Of course, the playwright could have heard the prototype of this encomium to drink in the alehouse or made it all up from scratch. But in the context of the trajectory that led the once prosperous bailiff to hide in his house from creditors, the end of this speech is striking: “If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations, and to addict themselves to sack” (4.2.109–11). Perhaps in the wake of the family’s financial decline, this was what Will took to be his father’s first principle, the legacy the crumbling glover had decided to leave him.

  But this did not mean that Will had to accept the legacy. One of the earliest anecdotes about Shakespeare reports that though he was good company, he was not a “company keeper”—he “wouldn’t be debauched, and if invited to, writ: he was in pain.” Aubrey recorded this around 1680, many years after the playwright’s death, but it is peculiar enough as a recollection to suggest that it might be authentic. “He was in pain.” Stories of drinking contests with village boozers or drunken flights of wit at the Mermaid Tavern or thousand-pound gifts from enamored aristocrats are far more the stuff of legend than a propensity to decline invitations with a polite excuse and to stay at home. A certain steadiness, in any case, rings true: it would be hard otherwise to imagine how Shakespeare could have done what he did—learn his parts and perform them onstage, help to manage the complex business affairs of the playing company, buy and sell country real estate and agricultural commodities, compose exquisitely crafted sonnets and long poems, and for almost two decades write on average two stupendous plays a year.

  Shakespeare depicted heavy drinkers from close-up—he noted the unsteadiness of their legs, the broken veins in their nose and cheeks, their slurred speech—and he did so with an unusual current of understanding, delight, even love. But his sympathy was braided together with other elements, including the overwhelming sense of waste that Hamlet articulates. He saw in Sir Toby Belch a parasite who sponges off his niece, ruthlessly gulls his supposed friend Sir Andrew, and richly deserves the thrashing he receives at the hands of the effeminate boy he thought he could bully. He saw in Falstaff something roughly similar—a gentleman sinking into mire—but darker and deeper: a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted. The drunkenness that in both cases seems linked to gaiety, improvisational wit, and noble recklessness is unnervingly disclosed at the same time to be part of a strategy of cunning, calculation, and ruthless exploitation of others. Invariably, a failed strategy: the grand schemes, the imagined riches, the fantasies about the limitless future—all come to nothing, withering away in an adult son’s contempt for the symbolic father who has failed him. “God save thee, my sweet boy!” exclaims Falstaff, when he sees Hal in triumph in London. “I know thee not, old man,” Hal replies, in one of the most devastating speeches Shakespeare ever wrote.

  Fall to thy prayers.

  How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

  I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,

  So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane;

  But being awake, I do despise my dream.

  (2 Henry IV, 5.5.41, 45–49)

  These are words written deep within the history play, words spoken by the newly crowned king of England to his exceptionally amusing, exceptionally dangerous friend. Yet it is difficult to register the overwhelming power and pathos of the relationship between Hal and Falstaff without sensing some unusually intimate and personal energy.

  HOW DID THE SON of the failing glover make it into the theater? In the absence of any documentary traces, the principal evidence, pored over for clues by generations of ardent admirers, is the huge body of work that Shakespeare left behind, the plays and poems that spark the interest in the life in the first place and provide tantalizing hints of possible occupations he might have followed.

  The strong presence of legal situations and terms in his plays and poems—used, for the most part, accurately, and infiltrating scenes where one would least expect them—has led to the recurrent speculation that he worked in the office of a local attorney, someone who handled minor lawsuits, title searches, and the like. No doubt much of the work would have been boring, but it would have put food on the table and would have fed his appetite for new words and fanciful metaphors. It is easy to imagine the law clerk, engaged in the humdrum task of sealing documents, letting his imagination wander—as the schoolboy had done over his Latin lessons—and conjuring up erotic visions. A few years later, the visions, still carrying the traces of their modest origin, take the form of the goddess of love in hot pursuit of the beautiful young huntsman. “Pure lips, sweet seals in my soft lips imprinted,” says panting Venus, pleading for another kiss,

  What bargains may I make still to be sealing?

  To sell myself I can be well contented,

  So thou wilt buy, and pay, and use good dealing;

  Which purchase if thou make, for fear of slips

  Set thy seal manual on my wax-red lips.

  (Venus and Adonis, lines 511–16)

  The image of the imprint in wax might, in this account of Shakespeare’s life, represent not only the imagined kiss but also the hard impact of his months or years of legal work on the poet’s imagination.

  Perhaps. But the strong presence in his work of terms from the leather trade seems a convincing personal trace only because of the objective likelihood that Will worked in his father’s shop. Once we get away from the near certainty of this experience, we run into Shakespeare’s uncanny ability to absorb vocabulary from a wide range of pursuits and his lightning transformation of technical terms into the intimate registers of thoughts and feelings. It is true that the absorption is not uniform—though in the course of his life he bought and sold houses, for example, he picked up relatively few terms from architecture and the building trades—but the general phenomenon is broad enough and intense enough to defy using language as a clue to any occupation he formally pursued. He undoubtedly took in legal language and concepts, but he also was remarkably attuned to theological and medical and military language and concepts. Was he directly involved in all of these professions too? A young man without prospects, he could have run off to the army fighting a nasty campaign in the Netherlands—so some, impressed by his theatrical command of military jargon, have speculated. He could, from his evident fascination with sea voyages, have found a place on a ship bound for America—“To seek new worlds,” as Sir Walter Ralegh put it, “for gold, for praise, for glory.” But the actuarial likelihood of his making it back home from such adventures was exceedingly small. And none of these possible professions adequately accounts for the trajectory that led from Stratford to London. Indeed, each seems only to lead away from the place that most matters in his life, the theater.

  The most obvious access to the theater companies for a talented young man was through apprenticeship. But Will’s marriage license places him securely in Stratford in November 1582, at the age of eighteen, and the baptismal records of his children—Susanna, christened on May 26, 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith, christened on February 2, 1585—strongly suggest that he still lived there or at the very least continued to make regular visits. Apprentices were usually taken on as adolescents and were not allowed to marry (let alone to father children in their late teens). Still, the skills that theatrical apprentices acquired provide a clue to some of the things that the young Shakespeare must have been learning to do, however he earned his living, in the years after he left school.

  The last will and testament of Augustine Phillips, one of Shakespeare’s fellow actors, business partners, and friends (he left his “fellow” Shakespeare a “thirty-shilling piece in gold”) provides some sense of these skills: “I give to Samuel Gilborne, my late apprentice, the sum of forty shillings, and my mouse-coloured velvet hose, and a white taffety doublet, a black taffety suit, my purple cloak, sword and dagger, and my bass-viol.
I give to James Sands, my apprentice, the sum of forty shillings, and a cittern, a bandore, and a lute, to be paid and delivered unto him at the expiration of his term of years in his indenture of apprenticeship.” Money was only part of the bequest. Both the former apprentice Gilborne and the current apprentice Sands also received valuable tools of the trade: costumes, weapons, and musical instruments. The fact that James Sands had to wait for his bequest until his term of service was up suggests Phillips had his company’s interests uppermost in mind: he did not want the young actor, inherited money and musical instruments in hand, to offer his services to a rival troupe.

  The terms of Phillips’s will indicate something of the expectations playing companies had of their actors. First, actors were supposed to be gifted musicians, able to play at least the impressive range of string instruments that Phillips evidently played—the guitar-like cittern, the mandolin-like bandore (from which we get the word “banjo”), the immensely popular lute, and the bass viol. Second, they were expected to be able to fight—or at least convincingly to mime fighting—with sword and dagger. More generally, they had to be agile: there is often dancing, as well as fighting, in Elizabethan drama, and all performances of plays, whether tragic or comic, ended with complex dances. (It takes some adjustment to imagine the players in Hamlet or King Lear brushing off the stage blood at the play’s end, joining hands, and performing a set of elaborate figures, but so they did.) Third, as the bequests strongly imply, they were expected to wear clothes gracefully: Phillips’s “mouse-coloured velvet hose” were no doubt designed to show off his legs—in this period of long dresses, it was men’s legs, rather than women’s, to which eyes were drawn.

  The musical ability, sword fighting, and above all the costly clothing of velvet and silks (for taffeta in this period referred to a kind of plain-woven silk) together point to what was probably the most significant aspect of the Elizabethan actor’s training: players were supposed to be able to mime convincingly the behavior of gentlemen and ladies. That is, boys and men, drawn almost entirely from the 98 percent of the population that were not “gentle,” had to assume the manner of the upper 2 percent. Not all the parts in the plays, of course, were of the gentry, and some actors no doubt specialized in lower-class roles, but these were repertory companies in which most of the actors were expected to play a range of social types. And it is clear from the budgets of the playing companies that they were willing to invest a great deal of money in making the impersonation of the gentry convincing. Their single largest expense, apart from the physical building itself, was the cost of costumes—the gorgeous, elaborate clothes that audiences expected to see gracing the bodies of the actors playing the parts of lords and ladies.

  There is a paradox here. Actors were classified officially as vagabonds; they practiced a trade that was routinely stigmatized and despised. As “masterless men”—men without a home of their own or an honest job or an attachment to someone else’s home—they could be arrested, whipped, put in the stocks, and branded. (This is why they described themselves legally as the servants of aristocrats or as guild members.) And yet the heart of their enterprise was a representation of the upper classes persuasive enough to delight a discriminating audience that included real gentlemen and ladies. Augustine Phillips was bequeathing to his apprentices the tools of a trade that much of the time required them to learn how to look and act like their betters. Phillips himself evidently wanted to carry the performance outside the walls of the playhouse: he simply bought a coat of arms to which he had no claim at all, an act for which he was subsequently attacked by an official of the College of Heralds known grandly (after the badge of office that he wore) as the Red Dragon Pursuivant.

  We scarcely know for ourselves, let alone for a person who lived four hundred years ago, how someone acquires a particular vocational desire. Will’s love of language, his sensitivity to spectacle, and a certain erotic thrill in make-believe may all have played a part in drawing him to the stage. But, in the light of Shakespeare’s family circumstances—a mother who could trace her family to the important Ardens of Park Hall, a father who had risen in the world only to sink down again—the focus of Elizabethan theatrical impersonation is deeply suggestive. Will may have been attracted to the trade of acting in part because it so centrally involved the miming of the lives of the gentry. As a practical strategy, this was, of course, absurd: becoming an actor or even a playwright was probably the worst imaginable route toward social advancement, something like becoming a whore in order to become a great lady. But as the legends of whores who become great ladies suggest, there is at work in certain professions a powerful mimetic magic. Onstage Shakespeare could be the person that his mother and father said he was and that he felt himself to be.

  Even without a formal theatrical apprenticeship, Will must have acquired much of what he needed during his Stratford adolescence. Local talent abounded; filled with linguistic exuberance and rich fantasy, Will could have studied the lute with one of his accomplished neighbors, dancing with another, swordsmanship with still another. Observing his reflection in a glass or his shadow on a wall, he could have recited grand-sounding speeches and practiced courtly gestures. And with his mother’s link to the Ardens of Park Hall and his father’s faded but still notable distinction, he could have arrived at the sense that he could confidently carry off the role of a gentleman and fulfill his parents’ dreams.

  John Shakespeare had once had great expectations, a vision of the arrow of the family’s fortunes that his accomplishments would propel toward a glorious future. At the height of his wealth and prestige—in 1575 or ’76, just before his downward slide began—he had applied to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms, an expensive process a person undertook not only to confer honor on himself but also to enhance the status of his children and grandchildren. To be granted a coat of arms—not to buy one on the sly, as Phillips tried to do, but to obtain one officially—was to rise above playacting to the thing itself.

  Elizabethan society was intensely, pervasively, visibly hierarchical: men above women, adults above children, the old above the young, the rich above the poor, the wellborn above the vulgar. Woe betide anyone who violated the rules, forgetting to cede place to someone above him or attempting to pass through a door before his betters or thoughtlessly sitting somewhere at church or at a dinner table where he did not belong. William Combe, the squire of a town near Stratford, sent a person named Hicox to Warwick Jail and refused bail because he “did not behave himself with such respect in his presence it seemeth he looked for.” The social elite lived in a world of carefully calibrated gestures of respect. They demanded constant, endlessly reiterated signs of deference from those below them: bowing, kneeling, doffing hats, cringing. There was virtually no respect for labor; on the contrary, it was idleness that was prized and honored. Dress was the opposite of democratizing—nothing could be further from Shakespeare’s world than a culture in which magnates and workmen often wear the same clothes. It wasn’t simply a question of money. By royal proclamation, silks and satins were officially restricted to the gentry. Actors were exempted, but outside of the playhouse they could not legally wear their costumes. In general, treatment by government officials and by the courts was drastically different for the upper classes than it was for those at the bottom. Even executions were distinct: hanging for the base, beheading for the elite.

  To pass from the status of yeoman—the term used to describe John Shakespeare, even after he had left the land and established himself in business—to the status of gentleman was a major step, a virtual transformation of social identity. There were many fine gradations in Elizabethan society, but the key division was between the gentry and the “common,” or “baser,” sort. The division was routinely mystified as a matter of blood, an immutable, inherited characteristic. But at the same time it was possible to cross the boundary, and everyone knew the ways it could be done. “As for gentlemen,” writes one canny contemporary observer, Sir Thomas Smith,
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  they be made good cheap in England. For whosoever studieth the laws of the realm, who studieth in the universities, who professeth the liberal sciences, and, to be short, who can live idly and without manual labor and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman, he shall be called master, for that is the title which men give to esquires and other gentlemen. . . . And, if need be, a King of Heralds shall also give him for money arms newly made and invented, the title whereof shall pretend to have been found by the said herald in the perusing of old registers.

  “Who studieth in the universities”: not only was this something inconceivable for the yeoman and glover John Shakespeare, but it was also something he conspicuously failed to see that his eldest son do. But all was not lost. The key requirement, if you are climbing into the ranks of the elite, is to live like a gentleman—that is, you have to “live idly” and to maintain a certain level of conspicuous expenditure. The next requirement is to hide the ladder—that is, you have to pretend that you are already there. You do so, Smith notes, by acquiring a coat of arms from an institution, the College of Heralds, which was in the peculiar business of concealing social mobility by reinventing the past. In exchange for money, the herald pretends that he has discovered in the old registers what he—or the applicant—is in fact fabricating.