Shakespeare, p.18
Shakespeare, page 18
Various inferior plays have been ascribed to Shakespeare as juvenile work, written when he first became acquainted with the stage. Other, more mature, plays have been described as later versions of his apprentice work. Perhaps his first plays have simply disappeared, lost in the voracious maw of time and forgetfulness. Certain surviving plays bear traces of the young Shakespeare’s additions and interpolations. In his first years he may have worked as a reviser of botched or incomplete plays. He may simply have revived old plays by adding new colour. There may, in other words, be a great deal more Shakespeare than is currently included in scholarly editions. Did he collaborate with other dramatists? It is impossible to tell. In his early years he may not even have been particularly “Shakespearian.”
The supposition must be that he began to write long before he came to London—poetry, if not drama, came instinctively and easily to him. Given the large number of plays that have been ascribed to him, it is also fair to assume that he began writing drama soon after first joining the theatre as an actor. His earliest known plays are so expert in construction and so plausible in speech that it is hard to believe that they represent the first exercise of his pen, adept though that pen was. There are certain early plays that may be in part or in whole his work. There was an early version of Hamlet, and perhaps of Pericles. There are other plays which bear the unmistakable impress of Shakespeare’s imagination, Edmund Ironside and Edward the Third. They are well shaped and confident, with a steady mastery of the verse line and a fine ear for invective and declamation. They lack the Shakespearian timbre or tone, but even Shakespeare had to begin somewhere. And there are the strangest moments of recognition—of half-familiar cadences and half-shaped images—as if the shadow of Shakespeare had passed over the page. Textual analysis also suggests that The Troublesome Raigne of King John and Edmund Ironside were both written by the same person, a “young writer, glowing but dimly in the predawn darkness of Elizabethan drama, just before the morning stars sung together.”3 There is one other question that has never satisfactorily been laid to rest. Who else could have written them?
Their inclusion in any list of tentative Shakespearian titles is not surprising, since in many instances they represent the germ or seed from which his more recognisable plays emerge. Nor is it inconceivable that he revised his apprentice work at a later date. It is generally accepted that he continued to revise his plays all his life, keeping in mind the demands of performance and contemporaneity. The suggestion has been rejected by some editors and textual scholars, on the very good grounds that it would make their task of publishing a “definitive” edition of any play quite impossible. But there is every reason to believe that the plays currently available in print offer only a provisional version of the plays actually performed.
So we see Shakespeare attending the plays of John Lyly and George Peek as well as watching the first performances of Tamburlaine. He knew The Spanish Tragedy very well. He was all too aware of Marlowe’s brilliant success. Contemporary literature was also around him. The manuscript of the first three books of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was in London, and the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles had just been published. If he now felt impelled to write for the stage, all these sources and influences were at hand. We also have the alleged “early” plays by Shakespeare that, at a conservative estimate, account for three years of his writing. Indeed they all fall within the period 1587 to 1590. During this period, too, the pamphleteer Robert Greene mounted a number of attacks upon an unnamed dramatist, whom he considered to be both unlearned and a plagiarist of other men’s styles. Who was that particular dramatist?
CHAPTER 28
I See Sir, You Are Eaten Vp with Passion
Robert Greene himself” was one of the “university wits,” a friend to both Nashe and Marlowe, who like many of his Oxbridge contemporaries was obliged to earn his living by hack-work. He was very popular at the time—plays like The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and The History of Orlando Furioso were “box-office successes” for Philip Henslowe at the Rose Theatre. His pamphlets are still considered to be unrivalled accounts of the life of sixteenth-century London. But he was sensitive to slights and extremely envious of his talented contemporaries.
He first attacked Shakespeare overtly in 1592. But earlier and more circumspect criticisms were also directed against him and Thomas Kyd. In 1587 Greene condemned those “scabd lades” who among other things “write or publish anie thing … [which] is distild out of ballets.”1 The argument still continues whether the plot of Titus Andronicus is derived from a ballad. It was a slight and fleeting reference, but suggestive. In the following year Greene’s companion and fellow wit, Thomas Nashe, continued the assault with an attack upon those writers who “seek with slanderous reproaches to carp at all, being often-times most unlearned of all.”2 Kyd and Shakespeare were the only “unlearned” playwrights who had achieved success upon the public stage by this time. In 1589 Greene composed a romance entitled Menaphon in which a “countrey-Author” “can serve to make a pretie speech”but his style is “stufft with prettie Similes and far-fetched metaphors.”3 These would become characteristic criticisms of Shakespeare’s style.
In the preface to Menaphon, Nashe amplified the attack. In 1589, Shakespeare was twenty-five years old. Nashe had just come down from Cambridge, and had decided to live upon his wits; he was the son of a curate from Lowestoft, and his subsequent career seems to fulfil the Greek proverb—son of a priest, grandson of the devil. He colluded with his friend Greene, and soon carved out a career for himself as a satirist and pamphleteer, poet and writer of occasional plays. He was well acquainted with Shakespeare; he hovered in the immediate vicinity of Lord Strange and the Earl of Southampton, looking for patronage and praise, and did not always evince the benign spirit of his contemporary. He was three years younger than Shakespeare and seems to have possessed the hardness or cruelty of early ambition; he resented the success of Shakespeare, and wished to rival or even surpass it. He never could accomplish that goal, and quickly became a bitter and disappointed young man. He was incarcerated in Newgate and died at the age of thirty-four or thirty-five.
In the preface of 1589 Nashe first attacks certain unlearned writers who are happy to appropriate the work of Ovid and of Plutarch and “vaunt” it as their own. “It is a common practice now a daies,” Nashe writes, “amongst a sort of shifting companions, that runne through every arte and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint wherto they were borne, and busie themselves with indeuors of Art, that could scarcelie latinize their neck-verse if they should haue neede.” The trade of Noverint was that of the law-clerk, to which we have tentatively assigned Shakespeare in his youth. The charge that he could scarcely Latinise may be an anticipation of Jonson’s remark about “small Latin and less Greek,” with the obvious implication that this unnamed writer had not attended university. Nashe goes on to remark that “yet English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as Bloud is a begger, and so foorth; and if you entreat him faire in a frostie morning, he will afford whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches. But o griefe! Tempus edax rerum, where’s that will last always?” So whom is Nashe attacking? The reference to “English Seneca”—the unnamed writer did not have enough Latin to read it in the original—would yield the thunderous melodrama of Titus Andronicus. The reference to Hamlet is self-explanatory, and in its original form this play may very well have tried to out-Seneca Seneca. And the quotation? “Tempus edax rerum” appears in The Troublesome Raigne of King John, the clear forerunner of Shakespeare’s more famous King John. It is now also a critical commonplace that Shakespeare adapted Ovid and Plutarch.
There is then a description of those dramatists who “intermeddle with Italian translations, wherein how poorelie they have plotted,” a plausible allusion to one of the earliest of Shakespeare’s extant plays, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The playwright is also deemed to “borrow invention of Ariosto”; the plot of The Taming of a Shrew derives in part from I Suppositi of Ariosto. It concludes with a reference to those who “bodge up a blanke verse with ifs and ands”; then, on a more personal note, they are accused of “having starched their beards most curiouslie.” There are later references to starched beards, as well as other allusions to law-clerking and schoolmastering as the unfortunate attributes of a certain country writer. It is an interesting mixture, out of which seems to emerge the elusive form of Shakespeare—indeterminate, not yet full shaped, not yet wholly familiar or recognisable, but Shakespeare.
There are many other specific references, rushing headlong over one another in Nashe’s cryptic and densely allusive prose. “To be or not to be” is ascribed to Cicero’s “id am esse am non esse.” The author is accused of copying Kyd and of trying to “outbrave” Greene and Marlowe with his own brand “of a bragging blank verse.” Can we see also in a reference to “kilcowconceipt” a nod to Shakespeare’s alleged origins in a butcher’s shop? The conclusion must be that these allusions are all pointing in the same direction, to the unnamed author who by 1589 had written early versions of Turn Andronicus, The Taming of a Shrew, King John and Hamlet. Who else might it have been? It was a relatively small world with a limited number of occupants, and there are very few other candidates as the targets for the combined scorn of Greene and of Nashe.
In 1590 Robert Greene returned to the attack. In Never Too Late he abuses an actor whom he names Roscius, after the famous Roman player. “Why Roscius, art thou proud with Esops crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers? Of thyself thou canst say nothing …”4 He repeats this attack two years later, when he refers to his opponent as “Shake-scene.” But common sense would suggest that this was a long-running campaign inaugurated by a “university wit” who believed himself to be unfairly criticised or neglected in favour of an “unlearned” and imitative “countrey-Author”—who, it seems, never once responded to the attacks upon him.
If the intended target is indeed Shakespeare, then we have evidence that he had a distinctive presence in the London theatrical world by the late 1580s.This means that he had begun writing for the stage very soon after his first arrival in London. The fact that he is also named as “Roscius” suggests that he had already won some acclaim for his skills as an actor. Scholars and critics disagree about any and every piece of evidence; but there is an old saying that, when doctors disagree, the patient must walk away. The figure walking away from us may be the young Shakespeare.
CHAPTER 29
Why Should I Not Now
Have the Like Successes?
So we can create a plausible chronology of this earliest period. In 1587, when part of the Queen’s Men, Shakespeare wrote an early version of Hamlet. This juvenile Hamlet has disappeared—except that from Nashe’s account of 1589 we know it contained the words “to be or not to be,” as well as a ghost crying out “Revenge!” There is a long tradition of anecdotal evidence that Shakespeare played that ghost, which would also make sense of Nashe’s otherwise incomprehensible aside on the unnamed writer—“if you entreat him faire in a frostie morning.”
Was King Leir, also written in 1587, an earlier version of Shakespeare’s tragedy? It begins with the famous division of the kingdom, but then diverges from the later version; there are more elements of conventional romance, derived from the popular stories of the period. In particular King Leir has a happy ending in which Leir and his good daughter are reunited. King Leir was performed by the Queen’s Men at a time when it is conjectured that Shakespeare was part of that company, and it is in many respects an accomplished and inventive piece of work. But it is so utterly unlike anything written even by the young Shakespeare that his authorship must be seriously in question. Another possible form of transmission suggests itself. If Shakespeare did indeed act in it, the plot and characters of the original may have lodged in his imagination. In the other early dramas related to Shakespeare, there is a notable consonance between lines and scenes. There is no such resemblance between Leir and Lear, except for the basic premise of the plot. So it seems likely that, on this occasion, Shakespeare was reviving an old story without much reference to the original play. King Leir is utterly unlike King Lear.
There is a third play that can be dated to 1587, if only because of a reference to it in Tarlton’s Jests. “At the Bull in Bishops-gate was a play of Henry the fift, where in the judge was to take a box on the eare; and because he was absent that should take the blow, Tarlton himselfe, ever forward to please, took upon him to play the same judge, beside his owne part of the clowne.” The Bull here is the Red Bull; the clown, Tarlton, died in 1588 and so this version of King Henry V must predate that time. Tarlton was also a member of the Queen’s Men, so the associations are clear enough. The Famous Victories of Henry V, “as it was plaide by the Queenes Maiesties Players,” has survived in an edition published in 1593. It is not a particularly graceful or elegant piece of work, but it does contain scenes and characters that were later taken up by Shakespeare in the two parts of Henry IV and in Henry V. In particular the “low” acquaintances of Prince Harry, Falstaff and Bardolph and the others, are anticipated in the crude but effective humour of Ned and Tom, Dericke and John Cobler, in The Famous Victories. Other incidents in Shakespeare’s plays are also based upon scenes in this earlier drama. Again, as in the case of King Leir, it seems likely that he acted as a member of the Queen’s Men in The Famous Victories and then at a later date employed the elements of the plot that most appealed to him.
There are other intriguing productions that, from internal and external evidence, we may ascribe approximately to 1588. One of the most significant is The Taming of a Shrew, which without doubt is the model or forerunner of The Taming of the Shrew. There are of course differences between A Shrew and The Shrew. A Shrew is set in Greece rather than Italy, employs different names for most of the characters and is little more than half the length of the more famous play. But there are also strong resemblances, not least in the storyline, and a large number of verbal parallels—including exact repetitions of such recondite phrases as “beat me to death with a bottom of a brown thread.” The conclusions are clear enough. Either Shakespeare took over lines and scenes from the work of an unnamed and unknown dramatist, or he was improving upon his own original. On the principle that the simplest explanation is the most likely, we can suggest that Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was a revision and revival of one of his first successes. The later version is immeasurably deeper and richer than the original; the poetry is more accomplished, and the characterisation more assured. Since they were published some twenty-nine years apart, the author certainly had time and opportunity to re-create or reinvent the text. We may use a simile drawn from another art. A Shrew is a drawing, while The Shrew is an oil-painting. But the difference in execution and composition, the difference between a sketch and a masterpiece, cannot conceal the underlying resemblance. This was obvious enough to the publishers and printers involved in producing editions of both plays; they were both licensed under the same copyright. The publisher of A Shrew went on to print editions of The Rape of Lucrece and the first part of Henry IV, so he retained his Shakespearian connections.
The most intriguing factor, however, in this early play of Shakespeare is the habit of purloining Marlowe’s lines; most of the interpolations were removed at a later date, when they were no longer considered timely, but to a large extent they characterise A Shrew. The two parts of Tamburlaine had been performed in 1587, and when A Shrew’s Fernando (aka Petruchio) feeds Kate from the point of his dagger, he is satirising a similar scene in Marlowe. The young Shakespeare also continually parodies the language of Doctor Faustus, which strongly suggests that it was the successor of Tamburlaine on the stage in 1588. There is the old proverb about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, and from the evidence of A Shrew Shakespeare was mightily impressed by Marlowe’s rhetorical verse. But it is clear that he already had a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, and realised that the bravura of Marlovian poetry might seem inept in a less rarefied context. At a later date he would contrast the high rhetoric of the heroic protagonists with the low demotic of the ordinary crowd. The young Shakespeare had, in other words, an instinctive comic gift.
In both versions of the drama he also reveals a highly theatrical sensibility. The play is set within a play; the themes of disguise, of changing costume, are central to his genius; his characters are very good fantasists who change identity with great ease. They are all, in a word, performers. The whole essence of the wooing between Kate and Petruchio is performance. There is here a plethora of words. The young Shakespeare loved word-play of every kind, as if he could not curb his exuberance. He loved quoting bits of Italian, introducing Latin tags, making classical allusions. For all these reasons the play celebrates itself. It celebrates its being in the world, far beyond any possible “meanings” that have been attached to it over the centuries.
The Taming of a Shrew was in turn satirised by Nashe and Greene in Menaphon, published in 1589, and in a play entitled A Knack to Know a Knave, reputed to be the fruit of their collaboration. We must imagine an atmosphere of rivalry and slanging which, depending on local circumstances, was variously good-humoured or bitter. Each young dramatist quoted from the others’ works, and generally added to the highly coloured and even frenetic atmosphere of London’s early drama. Only Shakespeare, however, seems to have quoted so extensively from his rival Marlowe; the evidence of A Shrew in fact suggests that there was some reason for his being accused, by Greene, of decking himself in borrowed plumes. It is all very high-spirited stuff, and A Shrew is nothing if not swift and vivacious, but the egregious theft of Marlowe’s lines suggests that he did not intend the play to be taken very seriously. It was simply an entertainment of the hour. Yet, like many English farces, it proved to be a popular success.
