Profoundly Entertaining: An Introduction to Shakespeare's Artistry

By Herbert B. Rothschild Jr.

Profoundly Entertaining offers the general reader a chance to think about Shakespeares artistry in a sustained way. Entertaining as Shakespeares plays are, that quality by itself wouldnt justify the effort required to overcome the difficulty their language poses. Their enduring popularity suggests that, to varying degrees, their audiences sense their profundity even if they cannot confidently articulate their experience.
Without any overarching argument to makemerely with admiration for the most intelligent, honest, courageous, and sustained confrontation of human life of which we have written recordthe book invites its readers to accompany Shakespeare on his journey of exploration into the human condition unobscured by prevailing orthodoxies and comforting illusions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 2, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465314451

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Copyright © 2006 by Herbert B. Rothschild Jr.

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Contents

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

Epilogue

End Notes

Appendix

For Deborah

FOREWORD

This book proposes to give the general reader a chance to think about Shakespeare’s artistry in a sustained way.

It began as a series of lectures I delivered on KUHT, Houston’s public television station, in spring 2002 under the auspices of the University of Houston. While students viewed the lectures for credit, I was more interested in reaching out to that surprisingly large percentage of the four million people in KUHT’s broadcast area who are channel surfing at one o’clock on Saturday morning. My proudest moment occurred when two separate strangers came up to me in a supermarket to say they regularly watched the program.

I didn’t require such confirmation of Shakespeare’s enduring appeal. His audience is enormous and, I suspect, growing as film and video bring performances within geographic and financial reach of almost everyone in the U.S., Great Britain, and beyond. The experience did, however, embolden me to try to involve a larger audience in discussions that would render more profound their enjoyment of the plays. Hence the title of this book.

From Classical times through the eighteen century, there was general agreement that art performed two functions. The Roman poet Horace taught us the most graceful way to express those functions: to delight and to instruct. The critical consensus eroded in the nineteenth century, when a radical emphasis on individuality generated the idea of art as self-expression. It’s tell-tale, however, that the Romantic period produced little drama of note. Drama is a public medium, and thus requires playwrights to remain at some distance from their creations. Art as subjective expression unerringly chose lyric poetry as its appropriate literary medium.

Twentieth century literary practice in part turned its back on the Romantics’ concentration on the self, and drama had a resurgence. But talk of art as instruction continues to grate on our ears. Whatever else in Romanticism was subsequently rejected, its view of poetry as re-lived experience rather than rhymed morality has endured. We don’t want imaginative literature to sound didactic.

Yet, great literature is instructive. Entertaining as Shakespeare’s plays are, that quality by itself wouldn’t justify the effort required to overcome the difficulty their language poses, a difficulty which can only increase as the gap in time widens. If we don’t experience these plays as revelations about the human condition, as ways to reflect on our own lives, then our time would be better spent with more accessible forms of entertainment.

So while Shakespeare’s plays, though instructive, are not didactic, inevitably my discussions sometimes will be. For that I make no apology. If there were no meanings to unfold, or if the meanings were transparent, I would not have undertaken this book.

Regarding my selection of plays, they are arranged chronologically and represent the various types of plays Shakespeare wrote. When I begin discussing my first, or only, representative of a type, I mention the other plays that are usually grouped with it, and why. By doing so, I’ve tried to orient readers to Shakespeare’s entire dramatic output even though only about one-third of it is discussed.

I scant the plays Shakespeare wrote in the first few years of his authorial career. The only play I discuss that was staged before 1595 is The Taming of the Shrew, and that discussion, which comes in the last section of the Introduction, is meant to illustrate my distinction between ritual and drama, not to explicate the play itself. On the other hand, I discuss all four of the major tragedies. These choices reflect my preference, not for the painful, but for the profound. There’s a great deal of pain in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first attempt at tragic drama, but the pain exceeds the gain in human wisdom. Not so the mature tragedies.

The play I regret most having excluded is Antony and Cleopatra. Instead of it, I chose Coriolanus to represent the two plays based on Roman history that Shakespeare wrote after Macbeth. I wouldn’t want to make an argument that Coriolanus is a finer play than Antony and Cleopatra. Yet, it’s far too fine to be as little known as it is, and I hope my appreciation of it in these pages will help enlarge its audience.

In my prose I’ve tried to preserve some of the informality of the spoken word. I favor contractions, and I don’t shy away from the first person pronoun, both singular and plural. My understandings of Shakespeare aren’t idiosyncratic, but they are personal to me and I want them to become personal for my readers.

This book is not offered as a work of original scholarship to the academic community. Unlike the modest amount of such scholarship I published when I was younger, my intention here is to include what I think should be said about these plays in any general discussion of them, no matter how obvious or often noted. Thus, I’ve made little effort to distinguish for the reader what is uniquely mine and what I’ve derived from others. Other Shakespeare scholars will recognize how deeply I am indebted to centuries of thought on this inexhaustible subject. I believe that they also will discover an independent intelligence at work, not only in particular instances, but in the overall configuration of the discussions. In a few cases, too, they may even be challenged by my readings, especially of Macbeth, because I have struggled long and hard rightly to understand and articulate its terrible truths.

It’s possible, I think, to follow my discussions without prior knowledge of the plays, but they’ll be much more meaningful if readers have it. Seeing the plays performed is likely to be more enjoyable than reading them, and what Shakespeare himself intended. With the exceptions of Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, and possibly The Winter’s Tale, a video store or a library with ordinarily extensive holdings should have at least one filmed version. The BBC taped performances of every Shakespeare play during the 1970s, so even the three I mentioned are available if one looks diligently.

I wish to thank Houghton Mifflin for permission to use The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans general editor. My rare departures from play texts in that edition of the complete plays and poems are duly noted. Readers should be aware of a convention used throughout that edition of the plays, since it affects the pronunciation of words and thus the metrics of the lines in which they occur. When the final ed of a verb in a past tense is not to be pronounced as a separate syllable, the editors use ’d. When it is to be pronounced as a separate syllable, they use ed. This differs from many other editions, which use ed in the first instance and éd in the second.

Since I continually quote from the plays, and since the passage of 400 years necessitates help in grasping the literal meaning of some of Shakespeare’s language, I had to decide how to provide it. Putting my glosses in the text itself struck me as less distracting than placing them either to the side of the quoted text or in footnotes. So wherever words appear in brackets (but not parentheses) in a quotation, they are my explanatory aids. To avoid confusion, I then had to omit the brackets used by the editors of the plays in The Riverside Shakespeare. The brackets I omitted would have indicated their textual emendations or their choices between printed versions of the original scripts. If readers wish to identify those editorial choices, they must consult the texts directly.

Two scholarly debts must be acknowledged here: E.K. Chambers’ The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford University Press, 1923) and Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (Columbia University Press, 1967-75). These landmarks of Shakespeare scholarship have been indispensable to me, as they have to scholars ever since their publication.

This work is the fruit of almost 50 years of a mutual intercourse between thinking about Shakespeare’s plays and reflecting on my own experiences. Inevitably, then, I have accrued a vast number of personal debts.

When I was an undergraduate at Yale University, there was a remarkable group of scholar/critics who taught me how life could be illumined by literature, and thus set me on a path I’m grateful to have walked. I wish to mention two in particular, Harry Berger, Jr. and Alvin Kernan, both of whom published excellent work on Shakespeare (among other authors), and were in more personal ways supportive of my work.

Ever since we became colleagues at Louisiana State University in 1969, my dear friend John Fischer, an eminent Swift scholar, has been an encouragement and a model for my own academic efforts. It was not for his lack of trying that I have fallen short of his extraordinarily high standards. Another dear friend, George Dowling, has been an indispensable encouragement to this project.

I wish to thank Meryl O’Bryan for her careful reading of my manuscript in its final stages. She saved me from a great number of minor errors and a few major ones.

Lastly, I wish to thank her mother, my wife Deborah, to whom this book is dedicated. In no small measure, she has made it possible for me to resonate with the joy of Shakespeare’s final vision of life.

INTRODUCTION

Why study Shakespeare?

My mother once told me the following story:

She was at a party, talking with a friend who, like herself, was on the board of the New Orleans Symphony at that time. Another person remarked to them that he had never liked the music of Mozart, to which my mother’s friend replied, That, sir, is no reflection on Mozart.

People have liked Shakespeare’s plays from the days of their opening performances until this very moment. In that regard, he has no peers in English literature. Perhaps the closest parallel is Charles Dickens, whose fiction, published serially in monthly magazines in the middle of the nineteenth century, had a huge following on both sides of the Atlantic. And although his reading public has sadly dwindled, his works continue to live in performance on stage and screen.

But interest in Shakespeare has never flagged, not only in the English-speaking world, but also on the European continent. And it has gradually extended to non-Western cultures as well. For example, the great Japanese film-maker Ahiro Kurasawa’s Throne of Blood, based on Macbeth, and Ran, based on King Lear, are among the memorable twentieth century renditions of those plays.

So, if you don’t enjoy the Shakespeare plays discussed in this book, that will be no reflection on Shakespeare. It may, however, be a reflection on me. I’ll try hard, though, not to allow our effort to understand the plays to obscure their theatrical power. Indeed, my hope is that these discussions will return you to the theatrical experience prepared to enjoy it even more thanks to a heightened appreciation of Shakespeare’s intellectual and artistic power.

Here’s one example that may explain and validate the belief that thinking hard about Shakespeare’s plays as texts can heighten our appreciation of their performance.

At the end of Act III scene 3 of Othello, the scene in which Iago persuades the Moor that his wife has committed adultery with Cassio, Othello kneels and swears vengeance on the two of them. Before he can stand, Iago stops him:

   Do not rise yet.

Witness, you ever-burning lights above,

You elements that clip us round about [embrace us],

Witness that here Iago doth give up

The execution of his wit, hands, heart,

To wrong’d Othello’s service! Let him command,

And to obey shall be in me remorse,

What bloody business ever [I’ll even murder out of sympathy (remorse) for your wrongs].

The BBC’s production of Othello, recorded in 1981, featured Anthony Hopkins as the title character and Bob Hoskins as Iago. At the theatrical moment we’re now considering, Hoskins stood behind Hopkins and encircled him with his arms. The reasoning behind that choice of staging is that it underscores the way Iago has ensnared Othello even as he pledges himself to serve Othello’s interests.

In many ways, Shakespeare’s text asks us to regard Iago’s destruction of Othello in terms of Satan’s destruction of a human soul. In the final scene, for example, when Othello learns how thoroughly he has been duped, he says to the men restraining Iago, Will you, I pray, demand [ask] that demi-devil/ Why he has thus ensnar’d my soul and body? Using such cues, either Hoskins or the film’s director decided to play Iago throughout as a demi-devil. The hallmark of his characterization was a fiendish little laugh. We hear it frequently and, finally, as a lingering echo when Iago is led off in captivity at the end of the play.

But although this staging of Iago’s pledge of fidelity to Othello made sense, it flattened the possibilities Shakespeare offers through his text, just as Hoskins’ overall portrayal of Iago failed to reveal the human dimensions of the character and thus the way evil actually roots itself in human life.

When Frank Findlay played Iago to Laurence Olivier’s Othello in their 1965 screen performance, he was far more successful in revealing the depth of the character and, through that revelation, the nature and force of the human diabolic.

At the moment of the play we’re considering, Findlay’s Iago kneels beside Othello. That’s precisely what the text calls for, because, if you reread the lines quoted above, you’ll see that they unmistakably echo a marriage vow. This is the moment when Othello divorces Desdemona and marries Iago. What that exchange means is complicated and deeply involved in the dramatic action of the play. When we discuss Othello at length in Chapter 8, we’ll spend time exploring it. But if you have any doubt about what I’m saying here, look at Iago’s final line in the scene: I am your own forever. Not the devilish, You are mine forever—though the irony of the line is spacious enough to include that meaning—but I [Iago] am your own forever. He and Othello are inextricably bound.

Every production of a Shakespeare play, like every performance of a Mozart symphony, involves interpretation. Great performances are the products of a multitude of specific choices based on sustained, intense, and thoughtful encounters with the text or score. And the more knowledgeable the audience members are about the play or the music, usually the more keenly they appreciate what is being offered them.

Shakespeare’s life

Let me share another personal anecdote.

Recently my wife and I were visiting friends in New Jersey, not far across the river from Manhattan. One morning we took the bus into the city, and we stopped at one of the food courts in the Port Authority Bus Terminal to fortify ourselves with coffee and a breakfast pastry for a day of sightseeing.

Sharing our little table was a young man who struck up a conversation. He was from a small town in Ohio and was traveling via bus to Massachusetts, where he was joining a theater company. His goal, of course, was to do well enough in provincial theater to come back and make it on Broadway.

After we wished him well and parted, my wife and I laughed with pleasure. What better way to begin a day in New York than to run into an attractive young man with stars in his eyes?

Now, imagine that the year is 1585 and imagine another young man—21, to be exact—who has fallen in love with the theater. He too lives in a small town a day or two ride west of his nation’s largest city and cultural capital.

Our young man, Will Shakespeare, comes from a leading family in the Warwickshire market town of Stratford-on-Avon. His father John, a glover, or leather-worker, had risen to the town’s highest office, bailiff. Regrettably, his financial fortunes had begun to erode some ten years before the time of our imagining, and he has just had to resign his long-held seat on the Town Council.

Whether repairing the family fortunes is on the mind of John’s oldest son as Will contemplates the future in 1585 we’ll never know—although we do know that within a decade he was making enough in the theater to do just that. Indeed, in 1596 he was able to pay the Office of Heralds the fees required for granting his father the coat of arms John had applied for twenty years before.

What we can, with more confidence, infer was on young Will Shakespeare’s mind in 1585 is that he has a wife and three kids to support. His second and third children, the twins Hamnet and Judith, had arrived in February. Their birth had come within two years of daughter Susanna’s, which in turn had come within seven months of his marriage to Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior. The theater would make it possible for Shakespeare to take good care of these family members, too. In 1597, a year after he underwrote the cost of his father’s coat of arms, he bought New Place, one of the two largest houses in Stratford, for Anne and his two daughters . . . Hamnet, unfortunately, had died the previous year.

But in 1585 Shakespeare’s fortune—and his considerable fame—were only a dream, if indeed he was dreaming of them. It’s pleasant to think that, as he contemplates his future, he does so with stars in his eyes, like the young man in New York Port Authority bus terminal. Honestly, though, we must acknowledge our ignorance of when and why Shakespeare left Stratford and what he did between the last record we have of his presence there—that is, the record of the twins’ baptisms—and the first record we have of his presence in London. These are called the dark years, not because of anything that happened to Shakespeare, but because we simply don’t know what happened.

Biographers, beginning with John Aubrey in 1681, have sought to fill the gap with rumors and conjectures. None of these can be substantiated, and most of them are as unilluminating as any of the claims—first made in 1785, when Rev. James Wilmot attributed authorship to Sir Francis Bacon—that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays decisively established as his creations when his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell published the 1623 First Folio of his works. Thus, there is no reason to dwell on these speculations.

By contrast, the first surviving record of Shakespeare’s presence in London rewards close attention. It’s in a letter written by Robert Greene, and found among his papers after he died in 1592. Before the year was out, playwright Henry Chettle saw this letter into publication, along with other of Greene’s miscellaneous writings, in a collection called Greene’s Groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of Repentance.

The letter is addressed to three men—almost certainly Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele—who, like Greene, were university men and had subsequently been eking out an uncertain living as writers in several genres, including plays. Greene has harsh words to say about actors, who are disparaged as Puppets, Anticks, Apes, and rude groomes in contrast to the rare wits who write the plays they perform.

In the next section of this chapter we’ll talk about the acting companies and their relation to the writers who supplied them with plays. Suffice it now to point out that the acting companies bought the plays outright for a fixed sum—usually anywhere from six to nine pounds for an original play—and then owned them, with no obligation to their authors to share the revenue they brought in or to perform them as written. In this regard, the modern parallel is not with the theater but with the film industry, where the standard practice is to buy movie rights to a novel and then have complete ownership of, and control over, the screenplay.

Right now, though, let’s focus on what Greene’s letter tells us about Shakespeare. Here’s the section that contains the unmistakable reference to him:

Yes trust them [actors] not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum [Jack-of-all trades], is in his owne conceit [opinion] the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

The phrase "Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde" is a parody of a line from the play Henry VI Part 3, which on other grounds besides Greene’s letter we can with assurance attribute to Shakespeare—disparagingly called Shake-scene in the letter.

Learning that in 1592 Shakespeare is an actor in London, not just a playwright, is information of major importance. A person might try his hand at writing a play with no prior experience, but participating in a London acting company implied considerable training. A London actor had to act in as many as six different plays a week. He had to memorize one or more parts in a new script every two weeks on average and rehearse it with the company. He had to sing, play a musical instrument, dance, and fence. And he had to do all those things well.

The city’s acting companies were so good that they were a major tourist attraction. Various documents survive in which visitors from the continent recorded their impressions, and the English monarchs—first Elizabeth, then James I—would usually command the companies to play at court for visiting royalty.

Making it as an actor in London, then, like making it in New York now, was hard. The work was demanding and the competition fierce. But the rewards were sizable for those who did make it, because making it, as we shall see, meant becoming a shareholder in the repertory company and getting a piece of the gate from every performance.

Only in London was acting that lucrative. In 1592, the population there was between 125,000 and 175,000. No other city in England was large enough to support a resident theater company. The next largest city in England—Norwich—had only about 10,000 people. Playing outside of London meant touring and performing once or twice in a town before moving on to the next. The schedule was grueling and the income uncertain.

We have a letter dated September 28, 1593 written by Phillip Henslowe to Edward Alleyn, his son-in-law and theatrical business partner. Later, we’ll talk more about these two major figures in the London theater, but the letter casts interesting light on the ardors of touring.

The plague—a word then used quite indiscriminately for outbreaks of contagious diseases—raged in London from mid-1592 until early 1594, so the theaters were closed to reduce the risk of transmission. Whenever there was an outbreak of plague, London companies would tour, and in this case a group called Pembroke’s Men were among those that went on the road. Alleyn, who might have been on the road with a different company, must have written to Henslowe asking for news of the whereabouts of Pembroke’s men. Here’s the reply, which I show both in the original to demonstrate how un-standardized spelling, punctuation, and grammatical forms were in Shakespeare’s time, and then in my modernized transcription.

As for my lorde a Pembrokes which you desier to know wheare they be they ar all at home and hausse been this v or sixe weackes for they cannot saue ther carges with trauell as I heare & wear fayne to pane ther parell for ther carge.

As for my Lord Pembroke’s [Men], which you desire to know where they be, they are all at home and have been this five or six weeks. For they cannot save [cover] their charges [expenses] with travel [touring], as I hear, and were fain [required] to pawn their apparel for [to cover] their charge.

The point of citing Henslowe’s letter is this: Pembroke’s Men was a company composed of actors who had performed in London; it must have owned glittering costumes and some successful plays. Still, they couldn’t bring in enough money on the road to cover their costs. Think, then, how uncertain a living the non-London troupes made, how much it must have meant to be asked to join a London company, and thus how competitive the profession was.

Given these considerations, we can infer that, during at least some of the dark years, the period of Shakespeare’s life between 1585 and 1592 about which we know nothing, he was practicing the profession of acting. It’s difficult to believe that he could have presented himself as a mere amateur to a London company in 1592 and been welcomed by people who had the pick of the crop. That would be like going straight from the high school orchestra to the New York Philharmonic.

We don’t know for sure what company Shakespeare was with in 1592. It might have been Lord Strange’s Men or Lord Pembroke’s Men or Lord Sussex’s Men. The groupings were unusually fluid during 1592 and 1593, mainly because of the prolonged cessation of acting due to the plague. There were a number of company divisions, coalescences, and reorganizations that we cannot trace with certainty. What we do know for sure is that in 1594, when playing resumed in the city, Shakespeare was a founding actor/shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which quickly became the pre-eminent company in London.

It’s pleasant to think that young Will simply ran off from Stratford with a touring company, like the proverbial boy running off with the circus. Companies did come to Stratford from time to time. According to the town records, during Shakespeare’s youth there were performances by the Queen’s Players, Worchester’s Men, Leicester’s Men, Warwick’s Men, Strange’s Men, Essex’s Men, Derby’s Men, and Berkeley’s Men. In 1586, no fewer than three companies came through—Lord Stafford’s Men, Leicester’s Men, and Queen Elizabeth’s Men (then the pre-eminent troupe in England, led by the famous comedian Richard Tarleton). The following year Essex’s Men were there.

By whatever pathway Shakespeare traveled to the London stage, by 1592 he was ensconced in the world he would inhabit until 1613, when he retired to Stratford three years before his death in 1616. Today it’s impossible to stand on a stage anywhere in the English-speaking world without being conscious that Shakespeare was there before us. He had predecessors and he had successors, but he never had an equal. Shakespeare showed us what theater is, and we’re still learning from him.

Theater in Shakespeare’s time

The entertainment world

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first play we’ll discuss, all the confusions and jealousies among the various lovers have been worked out by the end of Act IV. The fifth act is devoted to the nuptial celebrations of not only Duke Theseus and his bride Hippolyta, but also the two younger couples. Theseus calls for entertainment:

Come now; what masques, what dances shall we have,

To wear away this long age of three hours

Between our after-supper and bedtime?

Where is our usual manager of mirth?

What revels are in hand? Is there no play

To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?

He turns to Philostrate, his manager of mirth—the equivalent of Queen Elizabeth’s Master of the Revels—and asks him, What masque? what music? How shall we beguile/ The lazy time, if not with some delight? Philostate gives him a list of possibilities—all of which he calls sports. It includes a youth singing on a harp the story of the battle with the centaurs. There’s also The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals,/ Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage, which sounds like a masque, and The thrice three Muses mourning for the death/ Of Learning, late deceas’d in beggary, a title reminiscent of what were called interludes, semi-dramatic recitations, this one in a satirical vein. Lastly, there’s the play Pyramus and Thisby, prepared by a small amateur group of craftsmen led by the redoubtable Bottom the Weaver.

When we turn to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we’ll pay a good bit of attention to the way Pyramus and Thisby reflects on the larger dramatic action even as it provides the play’s most hilarious moments. But now our focus is on what it tells us about the entertainment world of Elizabethan England, the world in which Shakespeare had begun to enjoy some success by 1592.

I’ve already signaled the primary point by speaking of the entertainment world rather than the theatrical world. Theseus wants to be entertained, and he doesn’t especially care what form the pastime takes. He mentions as options music, dancing, plays, and masques (which are a formalized combination of all three into which the audience is drawn as dancers). All of these are familiar and acceptable sports or revels. There’s no foregone conclusion which one Theseus will pick. It depends on the specific offerings on Philostrate’s list.

That Theseus chooses a play is not surprising. From the lord’s manor house to the inn-yard, from the college dining hall to the town hall, sixteenth century English folk had been attending plays considerably before the first permanent theater was built in London in 1576. When the scriptwriters of the film Shakespeare in Love depicted Queen Elizabeth in the audience at the premiere performance of Romeo and Juliet, they took an historical liberty. She would never have gone to a public playhouse, any more than the President of the United States would go to a neighborhood movie theater in Washington. The entertainment came to her, not vice versa. Still, she and her successor, James I, loved theater, and would summon the actors to perform at court, especially during the twelve days of Christmas. Plays were a major feature of their Yuletide revels.

But popular as theater was, it was only one form of entertainment, and its status was no higher than that of its competitors for the entertainment dollar, such as bull baiting, fencing matches, and acrobatics (usually called vaulting and tumbling in the records we have).

Considerably before James Burbage built the first theater—we aren’t exactly sure how long before, but it may have been at least three decades—there were open air arenas standing on the south bank of the Thames devoted to bull baiting and bear baiting. These sports consisted of letting dogs loose to harass, or bait, the bigger animals by biting them and holding on while the bull or bear tried to shake them off or kill them with horn or claws. These arenas provided the structural model for the public playhouses. They were circular or polygonal in shape and rose three stories with spectator galleries overlooking the pit, or ground space.

The Hope was for all intents and purposes the last theater to be built before they were all closed in 1642 by a Parliament dominated by Calvinists. The Hope was erected in 1613 on the site of the Bear Garden, which had been demolished some months earlier. Interestingly, the Hope was then used for both theatrical performances and for bull-baiting and bear-baiting. The baiting seems to have taken place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, plays on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

Lest one think it was only the less cultured classes that put the performances of Shakespeare’s plays on a par with such entertainments as baiting, we have ample evidence of baiting at court. In 1557, the first year of her reign, Elizabeth entertained the French ambassadors after dinner (meaning the big mid-day meal) with bear and bull baiting. This royal entertainment continued through her reign and into that of James I. Here’s a contemporary account of James’ entertainment of Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Constable of Castile, on August 19, 1604 to mark the peace treaty between England and Spain. After the banquet and ball at Whitehall,

all then took their places at the windows of the room which looked out upon a square, where a platform was raised, and a vast crowd had assembled to see the King’s bears fight with greyhounds. This afforded great amusement. Presently a bull, tied to the end of a rope, was fiercely baited by dogs.

James went Elizabeth one better by keeping lions in the Tower and baiting them there.

The actors and their plays

So we must keep in mind that actors—or players, as they were commonly called—were entertainers. They might buy respectability with their earnings (Shakespeare did that), and they might even achieve some celebrity (the comic actor Richard Tarleton and the leading man Edward Alleyn did that), but their profession itself brought them no social status. They were always ready to respond to popular taste, which meant being song and dance men, fencers, and, in some cases, even acrobats, as well as actors in our sense of the term.

It’s a mistake to assume that the speaker, the I of Shakespeare’s sonnets, is Shakespeare himself; yet perhaps only an actor could have written the opening lines of Sonnet 110: Alas, ’tis true I have gone here and there,/ And made myself a motley to the view—motley meaning jester. And in the next sonnet we read,

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds.

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,

And almost thence my nature is subdu’d

To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

To put this matter in perspective, it’s well to recall that as late as Josef Haydn (b. 1732), who was attached to the court of the Esterhazys, European musicians and composers who weren’t employed as church organists or choirmasters were usually household servants, retained to help nobility wear away this long age of three hours/ Between our after-supper and bedtime.

Some of the English acting troupes of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century were paid retainers in noble households. Later, though, to be, Lord Pembroke’s Men or Lord Warwick’s Men, for example, did not mean to be paid as servants out of the household accounts, though the troupes were paid for command performances. Rather, the primary benefit of a formal, even though nominal, attachment to a noble household was the legal status it conferred. On the road, it allowed the troupe to escape prosecution under the vagrancy statutes that local officials used to rid their towns of vagabonds and beggars. In London, the connection gave the troupe a corporate identity and even some political influence when seeking from the Queen’s Privy Council the required royal license to perform.

An interesting letter has survived from the year 1572, the year the Vagrancy Statute was amended, addressed to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, by six men who toured using the Earl’s name:

Maye yt please your honour to understande that forasmuche as there is a certayne Procalmation out for the revivinge of a Statute as touchinge retayners, as youre Lordshippe knoweth better than we can enforme you thereof: We therfor, your humble Servaunts and dayle Oratours [men who daily pray for his soul] your players, for avoydinge all inconvenients that maye growe by reason of the saide Statute, are bold to trouble your Lordshippe with this our Suite, humblie desiringe your honor that (as you have bene alwayes our good Lord and Master) you will now vouchsaffe to reteyne us at this present as your houshold Servaunts and daylie wayters, not that we mean to crave any further stipend of benefite at your Lordshippes hands but [except] our lyveries [uniforms] as we have had, and also your honors License to certifye that we are your houshold Servaunts when we shall have occasion to travayle amongst our frendes as we do usuallye once a yere, and as other noble-mens Players do and have done in tyme past, Wherebie we maye enjoye our facultie [profession] in your Lordshippes name as we have done hertofore.

To keep in mind that Shakespeare was an entertainer who wrote his plays as entertainments should in no way diminish our esteem or even mystify us about his artistry. The distinction we make between the fine arts and the popular arts is essentially a class distinction, not a qualitative judgment, and it has never been particularly applicable to the theater. Perhaps the most instructive parallel in our own time, though, is film—an analogy I’ve already made once. The fact that all commercial films seek to please the movie-going public is not determinative of their quality, although it tends to bear heavily on their subject matter, style, and casting. Most films are mediocre, many are good, and some become classic works of art.

The plays of Shakespeare’s time were intended for production, not publication, and thus not conceived with an eye to posterity. The only English Renaissance playwright who saw his plays into print was Ben Jonson. Shakespeare did not, and we are extraordinarily lucky that John Heminges and Henry Condell, his long-time fellow actors, shareholders, and friends, decided to get them printed in 1623, seven years after his death. Without the First Folio, a full half of Shakespeare’s 37 plays1 may have been forever lost to us, and some of the others would have survived only in the unreliable printed editions known as the bad quartos.

In a poem Ben Jonson wrote to help introduce the First Folio, he gave Shakespeare the famous compliment, He was not of an age, but for all time. The truth of the compliment is undeniable—here we are, four centuries later, as interested in his plays as his original audiences. Yet, it’s no contradiction of that truth to invert Jonson’s compliment and acknowledge that Shakespeare’s plays were created, not for all time, but for his own age, and indeed, for his own day.

Like commercial film producers, the acting companies that bought and produced the plays were aiming at immediate box office success. If a play fell short of that goal, it dropped out of production after one or two performances. A long run might be ten performances stretched out over several months. There were perennial favorites. Christopher Marlowe’s plays, especially The Jew of Malta, stayed in the repertory for years, as did Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. So did many of Shakespeare’s plays, which were owned by the company in which he was a partner.

Based especially on the accounts of Philip Henslowe, a money-lender and the major financier of the London stage before and during Shakespeare’s career, we can make some fairly dependable inferences about the typical production schedule of an adult acting company in London between 1590 and 1610. A company would perform five or six afternoons per week excluding Lent, the hottest summer months, and periods of plague; schedule a different play each day of the week; and introduce a new play about every two weeks. Thus, at any given time, a company would have about 30 plays in its repertory, many of them recently acquired.

This is a grueling schedule to maintain. One requisite is a steady influx of material. The London theater was voracious of scripts; Thomas Heywood wrote over 200 plays to supply the market. Another requisite is a company made up of actors who are not only gifted, but also utterly familiar one with another.

The few acting companies that were resident in London were organized on the model of a trade guild, from which, indeed, many of the actors had sprung. The backbone of the company were eight to ten master actors, who were joint shareholders and thus split among themselves the net proceeds of the performances. There was little turnover among masters in the major companies, mainly because the profits were so good. Between 1594 and 1623, there were only 26 shareholders in Shakespeare’s company. The master actors made all the decisions about company management, including filling the infrequent vacancies in their ranks.

The masters formally apprenticed boys to their company, primarily to play the parts of women. Only the oldest and most experienced boys would play challenging female roles like Desdemona, and it was often a nip-and-tuck matter whether their voices would change before the performance. This hazard is behind Cleopatra’s lines as she imagines that if she allows Caesar to take her captive to Rome, she’ll have to bear the indignity of seeing her and her dead lover Antony travestied on the popular stage:

   Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’ th’ posture of a whore.

Once possessed of a man’s voice, the apprentice could rise in the ranks either of his original company or with another troupe.

The rank between apprentice and master corresponded to the journeymen of other trade guilds. The masters hired as many of these actors as were needed to meet the casting needs of the scripts they had in hand. These journeymen might be either on the way up or the way down—either wannabes or never-quite-were’s.

The company had other functionaries as well—the tiringman, meaning keeper of the wardrobe or attire; the prompter; and ticket-takers (although it was cash-on-the-spot, as at the movies now).

What a company did not have was a director. This is an enormous difference from modern theatrical practice, even in the fine repertory companies. That’s why a small chamber music group like a piano trio or a string quartet strikes me as the better contemporary analogy. These artists tend to stay together a long time, thus becoming thoroughly familiar with each other’s style. Each player is responsible for his or her own instrumental part, and together they work out the interpretation of the piece they perform.

A similar dynamic must have been at work in the acting companies, thus allowing them to work up so many plays so quickly. It’s likely that the first decision was casting the roles. A stable core of actors would make this relatively easy, since each master would have his known strengths. In Shakespeare’s company, called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men from 1594 until 1603 and the King’s Men thereafter, the leading male roles were played by Richard Burbage, son of the first theater owner and an actor himself. Burbage’s counterpart in the main rival company, called the Lord Admiral’s Men until 1603 and then the Prince’s Men, was Edward Alleyn, Philip Henslowe’s son-in-law. Each company also had a specialist in comic roles. In Shakespeare’s company it was Will Kempe until 1599, when he sold his share; thereafter it was Robert Armin.

Undoubtedly, an outstanding leading man who could tear a passion to tatters (which Hamlet urges the player king to do with temperance) and a comedian who could sing, dance jigs, and banter as if extempore, were crucial to a company’s success. But there had to be strength throughout the company if it was to function as a successful ensemble, which was the key to bringing a play to the boards with two weeks of rehearsals squeezed into a full schedule of other performances. Even today, with a more leisurely rehearsal schedule and a director to assure the cohesive performance of each scene, weakness in the subsidiary roles of a Shakespeare play will damage the entire production. They don’t lend themselves to a star system of casting.

No account of the actors in Shakespeare’s day should omit the boy companies. But for reasons that strike me as sound, I’m postponing my discussion of them until we get to Troilus and Cressida. You may, however, want to skip right to that discussion early in Chapter 7, then return to this chapter.

The theaters

A man named Thomas Platter from Basle left a narrative of his travels between 1595 and 1600. It’s in the Basle University Library. From September 18 to October 20, 1599, Platter was in England, and he recorded his experience of the London entertainments, including cock fighting, bear baiting, and the theater. Here is part of his account:

After dinner on the 21st of September, at about two o’clock, I went with my companions over the water and in the strewn [straw] roof-house saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius with at least fifteen characters very well acted. At the end of the comedy [sic] they danced according to their custom with extreme elegance. Two in men’s clothes and two in women’s gave this performance, in wonderful combination with each other.

On another occasion, I also saw after dinner a comedy, not far from our inn, in the suburb; if I remember right, in Bishopsgate. Here they represented various nations, with whom on each occasion an Englishman fought for his daughter, and overcame them all except the German, who won the daughter in fight. He then sat down with him, and gave him and his servant strong drink, so that they both got drunk, and the servant threw his shoe at his master’s head and they both fell asleep. Meanwhile the Englishman went into the tent, robbed the German of his gains, and he thus outwitted the German also. At the end they danced very elegantly both in English and in Irish fashion. And thus every day at two o’clock in the afternoon in the city of London two and sometimes three comedies are performed, at separate places, wherewith folk make merry together, and whichever does best gets the greatest audience. The places are so built, that they play on a raised platform, and every one can well see it all. There are, however, separate galleries and there one stands more comfortably and moreover can sit, but one pays more for it. Thus anyone who remains on the level [ground] standing pays only one English penny; but if he wants to sit, he is let in at a further door, and there he gives another penny. If he desires to sit on a cushion in the most comfortable place of all, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he gives yet another English penny at another door. And in the pauses in the comedy food and drink are carried round amongst the people, and one can thus refresh himself at his own cost.

The comedians are most expensively and elegantly appareled, since it is customary in England, when distinguished gentlemen or knights die, for nearly the finest of their clothes to be made over and given to their servants, and as it is not proper for them to wear such clothes but only to imitate them, they give them to the comedians to purchase for a small sum.

Platter’s account is a gold mine of information about Shakespeare’s theater. First, though, let’s note those few points in his account that are misleading.

Platter tends to use the terms comedy and comedians generically. In his usage, all plays are comedies, even though on first mention Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a tragedy. And the actors are all comedians. We might also note that he underestimates the companies’ outlay on its lavish costumes. From Henslowe’s papers and from assorted documents generated by litigation over theatrical monies, we know that a company’s apparel represented a major investment.

Here, though, are the many things Platter’s letter can reliably teach us:

Performances usually began at 2 p.m. While this may seem early to us, it accommodated the schedule of most working Londoners, whose day tended to begin about 4 a.m. If a typical play lasted between two and three hours, then it would conclude before nightfall, a requirement in essentially unlighted theaters.

At the time of Platter’s visit, there were at least three companies regularly performing at the public playhouses. These were the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and a less stable combination of seasoned actors that in 1599 were playing as the Earl of Pembroke’s Men.

The theaters at which these companies staged their plays were all outside the corporate limits of the City of London. When Platter says he crossed the water to attend Julius Caesar, he refers to crossing the Thames River to the south bank. In that suburb stood the recently opened Globe Theater, erected and owned by Shakespeare’s company. Close by the Globe was the Rose, erected in 1587 by the ubiquitous Mr. Henslowe, and used most by the Admiral’s Men, led by his son-in-law Edward Alleyn. Further upstream was the Swan, built in 1595 by Francis Langley, a goldsmith. Pembroke’s Men played there in 1598, but Langley couldn’t get his license renewed by the Privy Council, and when Platter was in town, it was being used for miscellaneous entertainments.

The first two theaters to be built—Burbage’s Theater in 1576 and the Curtain in 1577—were in the northern suburbs. The most direct way to them from the city was Bishopsgate Street, which passed through the gate of that name in the London Wall. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had disassembled the Theater in the dark of the night on either December 28, 1598 or January 20, 1599—the records we have conflict—and then carted the materials over to the south bank for use in erecting the Globe. So when Platter writes of attending a play in the Bishopsgate suburb, he must have meant the Curtain. We cannot determine which actors would have staged that play; it may have been a short-lived combination that included Will Kempe, who had recently left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

The pattern of building theaters outside the jurisdiction of the London city fathers is explained by their previously mentioned hostility to the theater. The hostility partly stemmed from a nervousness about any large gathering of people, which always has the potential for riot. Partly it stemmed from a suspicion that the theaters provided opportunities for sexual assignations. This was especially true of the inns like the Red Lion, the Bull, and the Cross Keys, that used their yards for plays before permanent theaters were erected and where bedrooms were readily accessible during or after the performance. Mostly, though, the respectable London burghers didn’t like the plays themselves. They didn’t seem to object to the graphic violence nearly as much as to the sex, which couldn’t have been graphic since the female parts were played by boys. But they also objected to the cross dressing such casting entailed. Substitute television for plays and this all has a familiar ring.

Two theaters were built inside the city walls in the two complexes of buildings known as Blackfriars and Whitefriars. These properties had originally belonged to Catholic religious orders. The Black Friars were Dominicans, and the White Friars were Capuchins. All activities on church property were exempt from civil jurisdiction and civil law—a source of continual friction in the Middle Ages. And even though under Henry VIII all the monasteries had been dissolved, their properties confiscated, and most of those properties put into private hands by sale or gifts to royal favorites, such was the structure of Medieval law that Blackfriars and Whitefriars were considered liberties, meaning they remained outside municipal jurisdiction, subject only to the Crown.

Other valuable information about the theaters contained in Platter’s letter concerns the costs of admission and the structure of the buildings.

Platter’s account of the admission prices at the public theaters confirms what we know from other sources. General admission was a pence and entitled the spectator to stand on the level, meaning on the ground at stage level. The groundlings had no chairs, nor were they covered from the elements. Another pence gained admission to a gallery where there was covered seating, and still another pence got a seat in the best gallery.

missing image file

What Platter says about the structure of the public theaters also confirms what we know, with more exactness, from other sources. The very best piece of visual evidence that survived is a sketch of the Swan Theater by the German tourist John DeWitt, probably made in 1596. It shows a circular building with three tiers of galleries running most of the way around the interior walls. The stage is the raised platform Platter mentions, extending halfway into the yard. At the back of the stage is a tall structure that may or may not be built into the circular wall. It was called the tiring house, a name derived from its serving, among other things, as a dressing room. Entrances and exits were through the doors into the tiring house. The stage is partly covered by a thatched roof—Platter’s strewn roof-house—supported by two pillars. There’s a balcony in the tiring house overlooking the stage, and in DeWitt’s drawing spectators are seated there. But we know it was used by musicians, and we believe that it was used as a play space when the script called for characters to be on an elevation like a balcony or the town walls.

What DeWitt’s drawing confirms is that there was no scenery in the public theaters. The sketch might have omitted rich decorations of the supporting pillars, the front wall of the tiring house, and its ceiling, often called the Heavens and painted as such in the Globe. But those decorative elements were permanent, unrelated to any particular play. That big bare stage could represent any locale the author wished. It was thus a highly fluid theater, but the audience had to cooperate by summoning its imagination, as the Prologue to Henry V requests in the following lines:

   Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very casques [helmets]

That did affright the air at Agincourt?

O, pardon! since a crooked figure [a zero] may

Attest in little place a million,

And let us, ciphers [zeros] to this great accompt [number],

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confin’d two mighty monarchies,

Whose high, upreared, and abutting fronts

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.

The pillars supporting the roof provided a convenient place for characters to step beside, thus indicating, by a well understood convention, that they were hidden from the view of other characters on the stage.

The DeWitt drawing indicates that there were simple props—in this case a bench—which the actors probably carried on stage with them. It also shows elaborate costumes. The stage could be filled with color from those costumes, supplemented at times with flags and banners.

From documentary sources, we know some things about the public theaters besides the existence of painted decorations that we could not learn from the DeWitt drawing. One is that there were trapdoors in the platform through which figures—humans, spirits, and devils—could ascend and descend. Thus, there was a Hell below to complement the Heavens above. Also some of the theaters must have had machinery up in the Heavens to raise and lower people or props from the stage, and to fly in angels and sprites.

Finally, a word about DeWitt’s rendering of the tiring house wall at the stage level. If it is accurate, it cannot be taken as applicable to all the public theaters. From the scripts we have, it seems that there was a curtained alcove set into the wall where actors who had remained hidden could suddenly be revealed. A prime example is in The Tempest, when Prospero quite dramatically reveals Ferdinand and Miranda to the others, including Ferdinand’s father, who was sure his son had been drowned in the opening storm.

Presenting the plays

Much as we know about the actors and playhouses in Shakespeare’s time, for the most part we must speak tentatively about the specifics of theatrical presentation. Usually, the best we can do is make educated guesses, relying heavily on the scripts themselves for clues.

Regarding staging, in some cases the internal evidence can be decisive. For example, the First Folio text of Macbeth includes the successive stage directions He descends, Descends, and Descend after the three consecutive apparitions the Witches show to Macbeth in IV.1. So we can be sure that each of them came up through a trapdoor of the platform stage and disappeared the same way.

Absent stage directions, the speakers’ lines sometimes can guide us. In Love’s Labor’s Lost, for example, there’s a scene in which the king and his three courtiers all unintentionally reveal to each other that they have broken their vows to spend three years in study, forsaking the company of women. The king, Longaville, and Dumaine are in different places on stage level, probably using the two pillars for concealment, but Berowne surely is up in the balcony. As he watches his companions, he says, ‘All hid, all hid,’ an old infant play./ Like a demigod here I sit in the sky,/ And wretched fools’ secrets heedfully o’er-eye (IV.3. 76-78).

Regarding costuming, we have some visual evidence—a few drawings have survived, most notably a drawing of a scene in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy. Often the text is illuminating, especially when the costuming is a key to the dramatic action. For example, in the second scene of Hamlet, his mother asks him to cast thy nighted color off, and his reply contains references to his inky cloak and customary suits of solemn black. That Hamlet still wears mourning while everyone else has followed the new king into ordinary court dress immediately signals the prince’s isolation and recalcitrance. Much later, his return to England in quite different clothes signals a new state of mind and spirit. When we consider King Lear, we’ll discuss more complex but equally meaningful changes of costume.

Speaking generally, costuming was a major part of the theatrical spectacle. As I said before, we know that the companies spent large sums on them. Given that the Elizabethan stage was bare of scenery, only the costumes—plus banners and pennants—could provide color.

Perhaps the best example of costume as spectacle occurs in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, first performed in 1588. Tamburlaine is based on a historical figure who carved out a kingdom in central Asia at the end of the fourteenth century. Marlowe’s hero has the following custom regarding sieges: If the city surrenders on the first day, all the inhabitants are spared. If it waits until the second day, only those under arms are killed. But if the city surrenders on the third day or later, everyone is killed. Each day is staged. On the first, Tamburlaine and all his army wear white and carry white banners. Subsequently the stage is filled with red, and finally black. Scenes are interspersed with these three scenes to allow time for costume changes. When I was in graduate school, I saw a college production of this rarely performed play. The costuming I just described made an indelible impression.

Because boys played the female roles, it’s unlikely that there was graphic sex. The same cannot be said of graphic violence. [B]arbarous and bloody spectacle (to quote a gentleman’s reaction to the sight of Suffolk’s headless body in 2 Henry VI) are commonplace in plays of this period. In Titus Andronicus, one of Titus’s hands is cut off. His daughter Lavinia has both hands severed and her tongue cut out. When their tormentors subsequently fall into their hands, Titus says to them,

Hark, wretches, how I mean to martyr you.

This one hand yet is left to cut your throats,

Whiles that Lavinia ’tween