Good company

Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1851), by John Faed; oil on canvas, 53 x 68 inches, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Sandor Korein  

Look here upon this picture, and on this: Shakespeare’s Richard III and Richard II, the first written in 1592 or 1593, the second in 1595. The title characters are very different: Richard III dominates his play, which is constructed as a series of dramatic tableaux heavily indebted to Senecan rhetoric modulated through Kyd, Marlowe, and other popular dramatists of the early 1590s, while Richard II exists as part of a network of character relationships and social structures. Apart from a brief moment of self-knowledge on the eve of the battle of Bosworth, Richard III is a type of the tyrant, Richard II an exploration of individual psychology.

What brought about this change in Shakespeare’s technique? The answer lies, according to Bart van Es in Shakespeare in Company, in the pivotal year between Richard III and Richard II: 1594.1 In that year Shakespeare became a shareholder in his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (from 1603, the King’s Men). Van Es writes:

The pre-1594 plays tended still to fall back on the established imagery and scenic patterning of contemporary playwrights—Shakespeare’s tragic heroes were insulated within a cocoon of self-defining rhetoric. It is my contention that the relationship of Shakespeare with his performers [post-1594] facilitated the creation of a new kind of drama—a kind of drama that was itself concerned with relationships.

The plays that precede Richard II—Two Gentlemen, The Taming of the Shrew, the Henry VI trilogy, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus—were written for various acting companies. There is some evidence to link Shakespeare with the Queen’s Men in the early 1590s, perhaps as an actor; he certainly knew their repertoire well. 1 Henry VI was performed by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose Theatre; the first published version of 3 Henry VI states it had been performed by Pembroke’s Men; the title page of Titus associates it with no fewer than three companies, Derby’s (formerly Strange’s), Pembroke’s, and Sussex’s. Nor did Shakespeare always have total autonomy over his material at this period. As Brian Vickers showed in a magisterial study, Shakespeare, Co-Author (2002), he seems to have collaborated with Nashe on 1 Henry VI and with Peele on Titus—plays in which, in any case, he is trying out a variety of fashionable styles. In his contribution to Sir Thomas More, made sometime in the 1590s, he was one of five authors who worked on that never-staged play. Until 1594, therefore, he was an employee of the acting companies, whose rapidly shifting fortunes made long-term strategic planning impossible.

In his early comedies and histories, Shakespeare’s skills are lavished upon linguistic and structural ingenuity rather than ambitious characterization. This may be simply the caution of a novice learning his trade, but it may also be, as Van Es suggests, a tactical decision. The plots and personages of The Comedy of Errors and Shrew follow established patterns of Roman farce and commedia dell’arte, but we have only to compare Errors with Twelfth Night, which it anticipates in so many ways, to realize the difference that could come from being able to rely on given personnel. Van Es observes that had Shakespeare died at the same time as Marlowe their writing careers would look broadly similar: a miscellaneous dramatic and verse body of work, obligation to various acting companies, and collaboration with other playwrights. Both would be known for plays whose central figures tend to overshadow everyone else. Instead, newly contracted to the Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare created two ensemble pieces which are centrally concerned with dramatic performance itself: Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As Van Es says, “It is . . . intriguing that, in his first full year in the fellowship, Shakespeare should twice have concluded a play with a performance that depends on the matching and mismatching of parts.”

A ground-breaking book by Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (2007), greatly expanded our knowledge of the rehearsal process for Elizabethan-Jacobean plays. An author would give an outline of his play, or a solo reading of his draft, to the sharers in the company, who would decide whether to accept and pay for the play or not. If they took it, a further reading might be given to the leading actors. A fair copy was made of the entire play, which was retained and annotated by the “book-holder” or prompter, and individual parts copied out separately. The entire cast then received a written copy of their cue-lines and their own lines, and nothing else; most of the subsequent “rehearsal” was in private, an adult actor working at home with his boy apprentice, who lodged with him, to memorize scenes they shared. Gesture and intonation would be practiced at this point rather than in full rehearsal. Actors learned their craft from each other; there was no equivalent of the modern director. There might be occasional small group rehearsals supervised by another member of the company, who probably would not be the author unless, like Shakespeare, the author had a financial stake in the play’s success. Extraordinary though it seems to us, an actor receiving his part, who had not previously heard the play read through, was ignorant of the overall plot, of what had happened since his previous speech, and even of whom he was addressing since the cue-lines contained no speech prefixes. The only full rehearsal would come, if at all, immediately before the first performance and would be what is now called a “blocking rehearsal” where onstage entrances, exits, and movements could be run through. The actors would therefore experience the entire play only on the day they were to perform it, in a week when they might also be performing three or four other plays from their repertoire without any fresh rehearsal. Palfrey and Stern even question whether all the words would be rehearsed; since the actors were assumed to know their business, time might be better spent on logistically tricky group activities such as crowd or fight scenes. Given these conditions, the leading actors had to specialize in particular kinds of roles, enabling them to rely on stock gestures, movements, facial expressions, and tones of voice. An actor’s interpretation of his roles would die with him unless he taught it to another actor such as his apprentice.

The play-within-the-play scenes in Loves’s Labour’s Lost, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet demonstrate Shakespeare’s familiarity with this process. In the Dream, it is Peter Quince, rather than the unnamed author of the “most lamentable comedy” of Pyramus and Thisbe, who allocates the roles, to Bottom’s frustration. We, however, can say that the part of Bottom was almost certainly taken by Will Kemp, already famous for his nine-day morris dance from London to Norwich in 1599, who appears, together with his fellow-actor Richard Burbage, as a character in a Cambridge University play of 1601 in which he refers familiarly to “our fellow Shakespeare.” Kemp’s vigorous, physical comedy, down-to-earth manner, unquenchable vitality, self-confidence, and fondness for malapropisms all made him perfect for Bottom and, later, for Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. (Indeed, Shakespeare sometimes used his name rather than his character’s in the draft of that play, a detail which survived into print in the 1600 Quarto.)

Opportunities for talented actors had been made before, of course; Kemp was regarded as the successor to Richard Tarlton, a wildly popular comedian, while Edward Alleyn had created the role of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and may have played Aaron in Titus Andronicus. The part of Lance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona looks like an earlier instance of Shakespeare’s writing with Kemp in mind. What is new in the Dream is Shakespeare’s freedom, in Van Es’s words, “not just to construct physically distinct characters, but to develop exchanges between characters where physical distinction was part of the dramatic effect.” Thus, Flute must be a boy whose voice is breaking, Starveling (as his name suggests) a very thin man, Hermia a short and dark-complexioned boy, and Helena a very tall one. All this is made clear in the dialogue and it could not have been done before the casting had been agreed.

In 1594, the Chamberlain’s Men became one of two holding an effective duopoly of performance with the approval of the Privy Council. Shakespeare prospered: He was rated as a householder in London, he obtained a coat of arms and therefore the status of gentleman, he bought New Place in Stratford, and he became a shrewd (and grasping) land and property speculator. The Chamberlain’s proved to be an excellent investment; twenty years later the core membership of original sharers remained intact and they owned a stake in two playhouses, the Globe—which they had built themselves in 1599—and the Blackfriars, which they acquired in 1608. The move to the Globe further consolidated their position since they had not owned the land of their original venue, The Theatre, and were only one troupe among many to use it. Shakespeare now became part owner of his own company’s playhouse, which was its exclusive property in every sense—no other company ever played there, an unprecedented arrangement at the time. Tenancy was held in common, prohibiting any one sharer from jeopardizing the venture by attempting to raise private capital using the building as an asset. This joint equity arrangement was also unique.

The original fellowship numbered eight men, including Kemp, Burbage, and John Heminges; they were later joined by Henry Condell, who, together with Heminges, would see the First Folio through the press in 1623. Shakespeare began to be more involved as an actor, in his own plays and those of Ben Jonson. Van Es remarks that his triple commitment to his company was without parallel among contemporary playwrights. The closest comparable case is that of Thomas Heywood, a dramatist splendidly described by Charles Lamb as “a sort of prose Shakespeare,” who became a founder-sharer in Worcester’s Men when it was established in 1601 and whose Apology for Actors (1612) is a landmark document in theatrical history. But Heywood was not an actor, nor did his sharer’s role last long; in due course, Worcester’s merged with the Queen’s Men and Heywood once more had to compete with his rivals.

In 1600 Kemp was replaced as principal comedian of the Chamberlain’s Men by Robert Armin. Their different styles may be summed up by saying that Kemp was the clown where Armin was the fool. For him Shakespeare wrote a series of major roles: Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well, and, supremely, the Fool in King Lear. These characters subject the world to sharply satirical criticism and their wit is shadowed by melancholy. Kemp’s good-humored acceptance of humiliation or mockery was replaced by Armin’s quick deflation of others’ egos and his self-defensive, chop-logic wordplay. Fascinatingly, Armin was not only an actor and a sharer, but also a writer—a poet and pamphleteer who knew Latin and Italian, and the author of one play, The Two Maids of More-Clacke (1609). His Fool Upon Fool (1600) is our most important source for information about the Fool’s role as it was understood in his time. Shakespeare’s relationship with Armin, whom Van Es describes as “a fellow creative thinker,” altered the character of his writing, introducing elements of absurdist comedy and taunting, even cruel, humor. The treatment of Malvolio in Twelfth Night is a prime example; there is so much in this play that is close to pain, and yet is not always acknowledged in productions. Van Es builds a powerful argument that Armin’s writing should be seen as a key analogue for King Lear (a second edition of Fool Upon Fool appeared in 1605, when the play was being written). Shakespeare thought intensely about the role of Lear’s Fool; almost a quarter of his speeches are changed in some way between the Quarto (1608) and the Folio (1623) editions of the play. It is widely accepted that these changes are Shakespeare’s revisions, and he may have been reacting to Armin’s evolving interpretation, even to his suggestions about the character.

The Chamberlain’s Men also had an exceptional leading “straight” actor, Richard Burbage. With his brother Cuthbert he had founded the Globe Theatre and was therefore financially, as well as artistically, important to Shakespeare, who remembered him in his will. He was a celebrated artist of the tragic passions. Contemporary witnesses speak of his intensity, his introspective absorption in his roles, and his remarkable flexibility in depicting shades and transitions of feeling. These qualities come to the fore in the character of Hamlet, as in those of later tragic protagonists—Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus—who are characterized by brooding self-questioning. With Armin, Burbage, and the rest, Shakespeare must have felt his position to be unassailable. Yet just at this point, a commercial threat to his company arose in the shape of the re-established troupes of boy players, which had first been popular in the 1580s. Shakespeare not only wrote nothing for them but even inserted a passage in Hamlet complaining of the “little eyases” (untrained hawks) who “are now the fashion” and taking business away from the public theatres. By contrast, Hamlet’s entertainment of the players at Elsinore (where, incidentally, Kemp had acted before the King of Denmark in the late 1580s) is an instance of court patronage, slyly implied to be much more civilized.

The plays written for the boy actors were tailored to their skills and also their limitations. Their temper was predominantly skeptical, their comedy ironic; emotional intensity was often mocked or undercut. Van Es believes that Shakespeare’s work in the early Jacobean period, particularly his treatment of women in All’s Well, Measure for Measur, and Othello, was partly an “investment in the values of the public stage” in opposition to this. That phrase is vague, and I wonder whether the distinction between public and private theatres need be quite so absolute. After all, the King’s Men acted in both the Globe and the Blackfriars, once they had it; plays had to be adaptable. Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and Henry VIII, all of which might seem more suitable for performance at the Blackfriars, were all staged at the Globe. Indeed, Van Es feels that Shakespeare’s part in the Blackfriars venture has been misrepresented; he was not a sharer here but a tenant, jointly liable for the rent and upkeep of the property. The contours of the company were shifting as new, younger actors joined, with whom Shakespeare’s relations were inevitably more distant than with his old associates. A degree of detachment set in; the closure of the theatres because of the plague between 1608 and 1610 led him to spend more time at Stratford, and his purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse in 1613, often seen as evidence of new commitment to London, may have been for investment rather than residential purposes.

The company’s acquisition of the Blackfriars has often been seen as encouraging the emergence of Shakespeare’s so-called “late” style, suited to a more select, intellectual audience, and to a playing space which offered the possibility of more elaborate, artificial stage techniques and effects. As I just suggested, the distinction between the Globe and the Blackfriars can be overdone. For Van Es, this style is partly a product of the fact that Shakespeare “was now working more as a poet than as a director of actors.” As at the outset of his career, he came under the influence of fellow writers, and meditated on literary history, as is shown by the use of Gower and Chaucer in Pericles (co-written with George Wilkins) and The Two Noble Kinsmen respectively. The tragi-comedies of John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s collaborator on Kinsmen and Henry VIII, suggested new ideas: exploration of the pastoral and romance genres, the theme of virginity under threat, a more conscious and elaborate use of linguistic and theatrical artifice. On all these matters Van Es writes outstandingly, and demolishes lingering prejudices about this phase of Shakespeare’s art being indicative of flagging powers. On the contrary, it looks decidedly aesthetically avant-garde.

Van Es notes that the closely integrated character relationships of The Tempest, the last play Shakespeare wrote on his own—performed before the King at Whitehall in 1611 but probably a Blackfriars piece originally—mark a return to the old tight-knit, company-centred technique after the more sprawling recent plays. He might have explored this further, taking in Katherine Duncan-Jones’s brilliant suggestion, in Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (2010), that Prospero’s control of Ariel and the other spirits, who would all have been acted by boys, represents a final allusion to the relationships between adult and child companies, and a distinctly wry one, for although Prospero dominates his supernatural troupe, he is also dependent upon their services. The question we would dearly like answered—Who played Prospero?—is, alas, unanswerable, and Van Es resists conjecture. Many would like to believe that it was Shakespeare. Apt and moving though that would be, there is no hard evidence for it. Burbage was still acting, but it does not seem like his kind of role, and that is all we can say.

John Aubrey, writing in the late seventeenth century, asserted that Shakespeare was “not a company keeper.” Later, he crossed this out, replacing it with the contrary statement that he was “very good company.” Whatever the truth about Shakespeare’s sociability, Bart van Es’s absorbing study shows that, as regards his professional life, Aubrey’s initial statement is definitely untrue. He helped to keep the company, and never did they make a wiser decision than to keep him.

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 Number 9, on page 20
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