Shakespeare: A Life (19 page)

seas, and peered 'in maps for ports and piers and roads', in Denmark,
the Lowlands, or Italy -- but we lack evidence of this.
²³
Under foggy, raw British skies, he took his training.

He knew that an acting company was a hard-working unit with eight to
twelve chief actors, or sharers, who had invested in it; they paid
relevant debts, and took on hired men who received between 5
s
. and 10
s
.
in weekly wages. Financially the troupes often existed precariously, at
the edge of ruin, and even late in the 1590s the Chamberlain's men had
low receipts and were in dire trouble. The income of an actor varied
greatly, as appears for example from G. E. Bentley's exact figures for
a later period. In the year 1634-5, William Bankes, a sharer in what
was then Prince Charles's troupe, earned £40, and each of three actors
in the King's Servants earned £180. In earlier years, profits were
lower, and in the mid-1590s when plague or riot had not shut the
theatres, an actor, in a sharers' group such as the Admiral's, might
earn on average about 18
s.
or £1 a week.

The playing company's relations with the community were always
problematic, and the troupes had many more enemies than just London's
city fathers. Pamphlets and sermons attacked the actor for being
ungodly in idleness -- a dishonest usurer, improvident, diseased,
obscene, or sexually 'variable'. Religious authorities feared that the
actor would capture Sunday audiences, and some merchants resented his
competition for Londoners' cash. Dazzling and charismatic on stage,
the actor offstage fascinated people, but also repelled them; he might
attract women from any of the social ranks, yet he was also seen as a
filthy pederast who kept boys as his 'ingles' or catamites. His ability
to arouse strong feelings and fantasies was instinctively feared by
many. It was felt that the actor could fatally induce divine wrath, or
that his alleged self-love or self-satisfaction could infect honest
people who went to work at regular hours. Moreover, from 1579 until
the closing of the theatres before the Civil War, the actor was
invoked as a person of no more status or real worth than a common
beggar.
²⁴

Yet despite its paradoxical reputation -- and even because of it -- the
acting profession drew into its ranks hopeful, intelligent, versatile
boys and men, most of whom would have felt lucky to have anything
to do with a troupe. A young man entering the theatre found that his

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fellows had their own special customs and hierarchy. They dined
together and went to the same, fairly inexpensive, taverns -- a young
actor was not likely to have much spare cash. As a hireling, Shakespeare
would have earned little more than a skilled mason or carpenter. About a
quarter of the hirelings worked as minor actors; the others were
stagehands, craftsmen, the 'book-keeper' or prompter -and his assistant
'stage-keepers' -- as well as tiremen in charge of costumes (one might
pay three or four times more for a rich costume than for a new play),
and gatherers to collect admission fees at theatre doors. Boy actors,
for female roles, usually began as apprentices and received little but
their keep.

A player-patron had no
direct legal responsibility for men who wore his badge and colours,
but he gained prestige from his actorsespecially if they played at court
-- and might influence them. Ferdinando, Lord Strange had become a
stellar patron. Related on both sides to the royal family, he soon
exposed a madcap Jesuit plot to get him to lay claim to the throne
himself; he lured and betrayed one implicated Lancashire Catholic,
Richard Hesketh, who was hanged. Ferdinando had hardly forgotten his
family's alleged leniency with papists. And yet proud, sensitive, and
alert to talent as he was, he borrowed funds to support the arts and
earned the thanks and praise of a long list of poets, including Peele,
Greene, Spenser, and Chapman. It is possible that he sent a few of
his protégés to his troupe; but this is speculation. He did watch his
troupe evolve. Once mainly acrobats, Strange's men appear as players
in the 1580s at Bristol, Plymouth, Canterbury, Gloucester, and London;
²⁵
in contempt of a prohibition by the Lord Mayor they played at the
Cross Keys inn on 5 November 1589, for which some went to prison. A
restructured troupe emerged to act six times at court in a single
season, before some of them formed, along with Shakespeare, the
successful Chamberlain's company.

Still, we have only a few hints (at best) that Ferdinando, Lord
Strange tried to help a young Stratford man. Shakespeare later
departed from his sources to portray Strange's ancestor Lord Stanley
(the Earl of Derby) in a better light in
Richard III
; and he may recall Ferdinando in the amusing grandeur of the King of Navarre (who has the unusual name Ferdinand) in
Love's Labour's Lost
-- but the portrait

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is not flattering.
Titus Andronicus
's title-page suggests this play was first performed by Strange's men, who also acted 'harey the vj'.

All of which, of course, does not prove Shakespeare began as a
hireling of Strange's troupe. Speculation thrives; there were other
patrons, of whom none was more important than the Queen. Her Master of
the Revels (officially a dramatic censor and an impresario for shows
at court) had been ordered to 'choose out a companie of players' on 10
March 1583.
²⁶
The Master banded leading actors from existing troupes into the Queen's
men, who wore red jackets and excelled in this decade. One of their
two prime comedians was Richard Tarlton. Drumming on a tabor, fingering a
pipe, then singing, curveting, skipping, and shuffling round and
round in a jig, Tarlton acted out his 'court', 'city', or 'country'
Jests
. He moulded audiences by acting not so much
for
them as
with
them; by bantering, calling for replies, and using impromptu wit,
Tarlton became a part of the community of spectators. And no doubt his
fame is important. He exploited something basic -- an audience's
'double awareness' of the player's dramatic role and of the player who
is only pretending. The Elizabethan actor, as in soliloquies and
asides, expresses his sense of being in fact a performer; the boy in
female clothes remains for the audience a boy actor
and
an impersonated female.
²⁷
Tarlton, among others, prepared the way for a great non-illusionist
drama, in which Faustus or Hamlet speaks with a more affecting
intimacy because audiences do not forget he is also a stage actor,
frail as themselves.

The troupes
divided and reformed; personnel moved about. If Shakespeare attached
himself to the Queen's men, he could have gone with the actor John
Heminges from there straight into Strange's troupe. For twenty years,
Shakespeare was to be Heminges' close friend and colleague. At any
rate, after Tarlton's death in 1588, the Queen's men split into two
groups -- one of them acting jointly with Sussex's men, the other
probably helping to form Pembroke's company. Unlike the Queen's,
Strange's men favoured dramas that were politically bold, or
controversial in topic and fresh in dramaturgy to draw the crowds.

Still almost all London troupes were alike in one way. They were
subject to a tight repertory system. Shakespeare knew its demands

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well, and they seem hard to imagine. A company in good, or ideal,
times acted on every afternoon except Sundays and during Lent; they
put on a different play each working day of the week, though some
plays would be repeated in the weeks ahead. For example, the Admiral's
men typically put on fifteen different titles in the course of
twenty-seven playing days. An actor usually had to keep at least thirty
parts in his memory, many more if he doubled in minor roles. It would
have been normal for Shakespeare (if he worked as a typical hireling)
to take a hundred small parts in a season. A leading actor such as
Edward Alleyn or Richard Burbage, in any case, memorized about 800
lines for a part, and kept in mind up to 4,800 lines in a week.
²⁸

Each morning, a hireling actor had to rehearse a new play while getting
up his lines for the afternoon's play, or rehearsing that one as well,
and seeing that his costumes were ready. The 'book-holder' or
'bookkeeper' along with several assistants or 'stage-keepers' saw that
the actors were ready on cue, and that properties were at hand. But a
hireling got along without a director's help, and probably without
ever reading the whole playscript. His own written-out 'parts', for
memorizing, included only single phrase-cues or line-cues from other
actors' speeches. On stage he was guided -- chiefly -- by his previous
experience of acting with the same fellows.

Shakespeare did not learn about 'character' simply by watching men and women; he had to
become
many an idiosyncratic person himself, if he had anything like the
experiences of a typical Elizabethan actor. As a rule, players became
skilled in a broad range of personactor. Young Burbage had to play the
old, hoary Gorboduc and the lustful Tereus in the same play, Part Two
of
Seven Deadly Sins
, performed by Strange's men around 1590. In
that drama, one of the female roles was played by an actor named
'Will' -- presumably not Shakespeare, who would have been too old for
the part, although women were sometimes acted by boys in their late
teens.
²⁹
And to make life easier there was type-casting. Now and then, an
actor was lucky enough to take on character-types he was familiar
with. When Shakespeare accepted roles in his own works, he seems to
have played old Adam in
As You Like
It, or the Ghost in
Hamlet
-- elegiac, affecting voices; small parts -- and, says Aubrey in the seventeenth century,

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he 'did act exceedingly well'.
³⁰
Aubrey could have heard that from the son of Christopher Beeston of
the Chamberlain's Servants; but it may mean little more than that
Shakespeare on stage did not usually upset his colleagues.

At 23 or 24 he submerged himself in a troupe. His survival depended
on quick, instinctive co-operation; as a young player he must have
seemed adaptable, enduring, useful. Our slim evidence suggests he
avoided quarrels, then and later, and took pride in ordinary competence.
Whatever wish he had to be exceptional in a group, he did not fulfil,
and as a repertory man he became a professional.

But it is by no means clear that he enjoyed this hard work at first,
and there are signs he was nearly broken by it. His success as a
playwright and poet was delayed; he admired poetry, but found the
theatre a quick-paced, disenchanting funfair, with jigs, dancing,
dumb-shows and clowns' acts interlaced with drama. As an actor, he
learned facile tricks to get by, or hurried effects to win applause; and
so as a playwright he would repeat stratagems, or rely at times on
the makeshift. He might disguise yet one more heroine as a boy, or
trust in actors to bring static roles to life, or assume an audience
would not notice minor contradictions or improbabilities in a piece.

The playbooks were mostly written by those who were gentlemen by
virtue of their Oxford or Cambridge degrees. Their work was in demand
and Shakespeare studied it, possibly without realizing that a common
player such as himself could offend university men by writing at all.
Clearly, the companies hungered for scripts. To make their plays,
writers were ransacking a wide range of sources, as Stephen Gosson, a
playwright turned pamphleteer, noticed in 1582: 'the Palace of
Pleasure, the Golden Asse, the (Ethiopian historie, Amadis of Fraunce,
the Rounde Table, bawdie Comedies in Latine, French, Italian, and
Spanish'.
³¹
A company needed fifteen or twenty new plays a year. This imposed an
enormous demand on the writers, and on the whole fund of available
stories and plots in history and literature. Fresh, exciting plays
helped to fill galleries -- to the despair of the stage's opponents. A
letter-writer observes in 1587 how 'two hundred proude players jett
in their silkes, wheare five hundred pore people sterve in the
streets'.
³²

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Much in demand were competent writers, such as the 'University Wits',
who included men such as Nashe, Greene, Peele, Lodge, and Thomas
Watson. A cut above them all, socially and artistically, was young
John Lyly, who since writing
Euphues
had supplied the boys of
Paul's School with the finest English comedies Londoners had so far
seen. A holder, like Greene, of two MA degrees, fashionably married
and, in 1589, about to become an MP, Lyly, it seems, hoped in vain to be
Master of the Revels. As an enterprising, short-statured man living
in the parish of St Martin's, Ludgate, he was the major dramatist of
the decade.

Shakespeare -- who knew
Euphues
-- could have read Lyly's comedies
Campaspe
and
Sapho and Phao
in their 1584 quartos, or seen Lyly's
Endimion
or
Midas
acted a few years later. He may well have learned from Lyly
Mother Bombie
,
The Woman in the Moon
, or
Love's Metamorphosis
after starting to write himself. In the most routine of Lyly's work -- and nobody has argued that
Midas
is one of his stronger plays -- there is elegant wit, specificity, and exuberance, as when in
Midas
the servants Licio and Petulus discuss Licio's mistress (and thereby
explain to London's gentry why their wives are costing them so much in
London's fashionable shops):

LICIO. Well, she hath the tongue of a parrot.

PETULUS. That's a leaden dagger in a velvet sheath, to have a black
tongue in a fair mouth. . . . But now you can say no more of the head,
begin with the purtenances, for that was your promise.

LICIO. The purtenances! It is impossible to reckon them up, much less
tell the nature of them. Hoods, frontlets, wires, cauls,
curling-irons, periwigs, bodkins, fillets, hairlaces, ribbons, rolls,
knot-strings, glasses, combs, caps, hats, coifs, kerchers, cloths,
earrings, borders, crepines, shadows, spots, and so many other trifles
as both I want the words of art to name them, time to utter them, and
wit to remember them. These be but a few notes.

PETULUS. Notes, quoth you! I note one thing.

LICIO. What is that?

PETULUS. That if every part require so much as the head, it will make the richest husband in the world ache at the heart.
³³

Lyly's juvenile pages can be obscene. His women are refined, winning,
and natural skirmishers, in a tradition followed by many of
Shakespeare's heroines. His dramatic style has been called dainty or
deli-

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