Shakespeare: A Life (36 page)

and making textual changes. Shakespeare burlesques himself as a
Johannes Factotum
whose efforts produce nonsense, and 'Pyramus' in fact explicitly
parodies Romeo and Juliet and has mocking allusions as well to Titus,
Comedy of Errors, and the Two Gentlemen.

Theseus, on the other hand, is gallant enough to defend even the
stage's feeblest performances. 'The best in this kind are but shadows',
he tells his warrior-bride, 'and the worst are no worse if imagination
amend them' (v. i. 210-11). After his days of rape and conquest, the
Duke is politically astute. Indeed, in his noble, good-natured
authority and concern with illusion, as in his freshness of thought and
charity towards the 'rude mechanicals', he might almost typify
Shakespeare's interest in the ideal leader of a modern political state.

The Chamberlain's men needed many plays. Inevitably they took in poor
scripts to fill up a week, but, no matter what was done, the outlook
deteriorated, and financial straits and worse trouble lay ahead in a
time of ruined harvests, inflation, hostile city aldermen, rising
numbers of the poor, and intermittent plague. Dull afternoons with
feeble dramas, and half-empty galleries, could bring ruin quickly.
Their resident poet noted failures: 'I was lately here in the end of a
displeasing play', Shakespeare writes for one of his curtseying
Epilogues.
¹⁷
He also had noted a hunger for political plays evoking shames of the
state and cutting close to the bone, and, partly because of the
success of Henry VI, he soon turned again to politics and history.

In fact he wrote Richard II as the opening work in a series of four
dramas about the Lancastrian kings who had reigned before the period
of his first tetralogy -- or in the seventeen years between
Bolingbroke's quarrel with Mowbray in 1398 and the aftermath of
Agincourt in 1415.

This was the
riskiest of his projects, and the first drama in the series nearly
ruined his company. For one thing, with Richard II, he doubtless irked
the Queen. 'I am Richard II, know ye not that?' Elizabeth later told
the antiquary William Lambarde at Greenwich Palace on 4. August 1601.
Her political enemies had compared her with

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Richard II, who had lacked a direct heir as she did and had been
deposed. The Essex-and-Southampton faction pressed that analogy
fatally, and she felt that the theatre was partly to blame. 'This
tragedy', she told poor Lambarde (who died fifteen days after the
interview), 'was played 40
^tie
times in open streets and
houses.' Lambarde tried to mollify her, but she returned to Richard II
and 'demanded', as the old antiquary put it, ' "Whether I had seen
any true picture, or lively representation of his countenance and
person?" ' 'None but such as be in common hands', she was told.
¹⁸

The scene in Richard II in which the king is forcibly deposed was
censored or never printed while the Queen was alive, but, luckily, the
rash acting of the play by the Chamberlain's men at the request of five
or six of Essex's conspirators on 7 February 1601 (only a day before
their abortive coup) did not bring down the company; they were cleared
of conspiracy in the Essex revolt. On behalf of Shakespeare's men,
Augustine Phillips at a trial on 18 February -- perhaps in one of the
star performances of his life -- claimed that his actors had told
Essex's men that the play was 'so old & so long out of use as that
they should get no company at it'. Actors, like newborn babes or
sheep in a meadow, knew nothing of politics; that was implicitly
clear, but, as a respected sharer, Phillips stuck to the point. He
recalled that his troupe had heartily wished to put on 'some other
play' for the Essex conspirators, who, nevertheless, gave them 40s.
above the ordinary fee to put on this one.
¹⁹

One feels, anyway, that the actors had reason to be pleasant with the
Queen's officials. The Revels Office had been tolerating a good deal
of political comment. But in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had taken
risks with Richard II. An unusually ceremonial play, it balances the
story of King Richard's fall with that of Harry Bolingbroke's ominous
and deadly rise. Richard talks, but Bolingbroke takes steps. Law and
tradition have ensured Richard's right to the crown, and yet having
had his uncle Gloucester killed by means of the Duke of Norfolk, he
falters, and while picturing his guilt and self-pity, he foolishly
relies on the crown's mystique to save him.

Shakespeare had taken very special pains with the work, using details
in Holinshed Chronicles but looking into more alternative sources
than for any other history play. Also he lavished care on verbal
texture,

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to the extent that his text has an unusual verbal decorum. Few plays
demand more of the 'ear', and its rhythms or quirky negative verbs
('unkiss', 'uncurse', 'undeaf ', 'unhappied') are intendedly medieval in
a very Elizabethan way. Just as Marlowe's Edward II affects the
portrayal of Richard, so Spenser's deliberately archaic manner in The
Faerie Queene, for example, influences Shakespeare's language.

The play's choric figures hardly seem medieval. As if he were one of
Elizabeth's clergy, the Bishop of Carlisle implores a lax Richard to use
strength to resist Bolingbroke -- and Aumerle rubs in the lesson:

He means, my lord, that we are too remiss,
Whilst Bolingbroke through our security,
Grows strong and great in substance and in power.

(111. ii. 29-31)

Rather so did the Queen feel about British military laxity and Spain's
threat in 1595 -- when a Spanish invasion was expected, her troops had
withdrawn from the Continent, and Ireland stirred in revolt. In one
respect, Shakespeare offers a sad object-lesson almost bound to please
a militant anxious Queen and her Privy Council. He makes Richard
even more passive than any historical source had shown him to be.

But, then, Richard is potent in his fall. There is a metaphysical
aspect in his tragedy, even as his faith in the crown is mocked by a
nasty, emergent pragmatism. How patriotic was Shakespeare? The dying
Gaunt very poignantly evokes an England which the young king wastes
and neglects:

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England . . .

(11. i. 41-50)

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But even Gaunt can be less impressive than the spectacle of the decline of medievalism in Richard's talk in Acts IV and V.

Shakespeare designed his plays to be open to multiple interpretation,
and all have inexhaustible problems. But with more intellectual
confidence here than in earlier history plays, he uses patriotism as a
theme to be balanced against deeply upsetting ideas. Richard II shows
how easy it is to be rid of an anointed king. Not God's power, but
presumptions about divinity are radically at issue: the play demystifies
monarchy by undercutting its godly sanction, and implies that a
divinely ordained ruler is no concern of heaven. The idea that God no
longer 'guards the right' has a dramatic shock, and counters tenets of
belief which have supported armies from Tudor times to ours. As a key
work in its author's development, Richard II also opens a path for his
tragedies. If even the anointed servant is not protected by divine
favour, history may be nothing more than a product of human volition;
and emphasis falls upon choice, responsibility, and resourcefulness as
factors that may determine the fate of a Macbeth or a Lear.

After this prelude, the author explores ambiguities of modern politics
in 1 and 2 Henry IV in which the terse, practical Harry Bolingbroke --
now Henry IV -- contends with a single armed political rebellion and
has a truant-rebel in his eldest son, Prince Henry or Hal ('my
unthrifty son' and 'a plague' in Richard II). In an early part of The
Civil Wars ( 1595), Samuel Daniel had made Hal and Hotspur of about
the same age, and so foils and rivals. More boldly, Shakespeare puts
Hal at the centre of an evolving familial, military, and political
picture which involves most of British society.

Looming in the foreground is the bulky, dissolute colossus of Falstaff,
who might be the soul of the suburbs or an urban Lord of Misrule expert
in Nashe's raillery, or Tarlton's repartee, except that he is more
inclusive. He is more complex than any of his sources: 'it is hard to
get one's mind all round him', William Empson once noted, though there
is no reason why Falstaff should be consistent, as modern critics of
stage performance (such as Samuel Crowl in his Shakespeare Observed)
often imply. Falstaff was probably acted by Kempe, whose artificial
girth on stage would have been telling. A Jacobean drawing shows a
reduced and tidy Falstaff in doublet and breeches

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with lace-topped boots, but the architect Inigo Jones (born in 1573)
could have seen Kempe's clown, and Jones later specifies 'like a S
^r
John
fall staff' in describing a similar figure: 'a roabe of russet Girt low', he writes, 'w
i
t
h
a great belley' and 'buskines to shew a great swolen lege' -- a figure with a 'great head and balde'.
²⁰

As in the Merchant or Much Ado, Shakespeare could hope to appeal to
idlers and lawyers at the Inns of Court and of Chancery and well
beyond. Falstaff, as the most intelligent of clowns, has been an Inn of
Chancery law student of Clement's Inn, who began to crack skulls as a
mere lad ( 2 Henry IV, III. ii). He appears with Hal in a very Tudor
Eastcheap, which had in Gracechurch Street a street of haberdashers
pronounced as ' Grass Street', as well as what Stow calls a 'flesh
Market of Butchers' and the Boar's Head among other taverns.
²¹
Prince Hal's education includes bouts of heady enjoyment and combats
of wit with a glutton. Both are canny actors, and yet, though Falstaff
lies, he counters the worst shams of wartime patriotism. The Prince
has an authentic self only when with him. Like Doll Tearsheet, the
clown even becomes a standard of social truth, as when, as a captain,
he reports on his men at Shrewsbury: 'I have led my ragamuffins where
they are peppered; there's not three of my hundred and fifty left
alive, and they are for the town's end, to beg during life' ( I Henry
IV, v. iii. 35-8). That condemns the army system, not the fat clown.
Similarly when Doll is scandalized by Pistol's captaincy, she really
derides the Tudor practice of giving offices by court favour. 'You a
captain?' she screams at Pistol,

You slave! For what? For tearing a poor whore's ruff in a bawdy-house!
He a captain! Hang him, rogue, he lives upon mouldy stewed prunes and
dried cakes. A captain? God's light, these villains will make the word
'captain' odious; therefore captains had need look to't. ( 2 Henry IV,
II. iv. 139-44)

Yet it
is Falstaff who best exposes a gap between Renaissance language and
action, and to the extent that he pictures the excesses of humanist
faith in the word, he might be a rebel in the advanced grammarschool era
of the 1570s. He is the only being through whom the Poet of the
Sonnets might speak the truth. Cat-like and alert, despite his bulk,
he is in his odd, aggrandizing passivity, easy sociability, and

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detachment so much like the author that a resemblance may have amused
the actors. Both poet and clown are pretenders; both exploit royalty;
both try to control reality through words; both appear to seek male
affection and approval with the utmost urgency. Both are insouciant but
not arrogant -- and perhaps only a writer of unusual receptivity and
great personal modesty could have brought such a clown into being.
Falstaff symbolizes nothing exactly because he engrosses so many
meanings.

Critics, more often than
audiences, nonetheless find fault with Henry IV. If Falstaff's lying
is not thought to be objectionable, the Prince's lying can seem slick
and self-interested: it is impossible to know when, or if ever, he
tells the truth, and commentators fault him in all three parts of the
Henriad. 'Hal is an anti-Midas; everything he touches turns to dross',
writes Stephen Greenblatt. 'Hal is the prince and principle of
falsification-he is himself a counterfeit companion.'
²²
Certainly Hal lies in order to manipulate appearances as he waits to
amaze the world and to redeem himself by rejecting Falstaff, but he
comes out of the chrysalis as a rather stiff butterfly.

His interior life -- if it exists -- is not on display even in Henry V.
Shakespeare concerns himself here with the theatre of politics and
writes his most effectively playable history drama. It is likely that he
added the apologetic Chorus at a late point, and just how vital that
is to the play's success can become clear when the Chorus is missing,
as in the brief quarto of 1600. Shakespeare never wrote with a
narrower, more coercive purpose than he did for a Chorus which
steadily praises King Harry and amplifies his settings:

Now entertain conjecture of a time When creeping murmur and the
poring dark Fills the wide vessel of the universe. (IV. O. 1-3)

Yet the Chorus might have wandered in from another play. It describes
wrong settings, contradicts the stage-action, or sends Harry off to
Harfleur from two different ports. It refers to honour 'in the breast
of every man' just before we see the Eastcheap rogues. On the eve of
Agincourt, it speaks of a 'little touch of Harry in the night',

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