The fact that Manningham compared Twelfth Night to The Comedy of Errors suggests that there were playgoers who were familiar with a number of Shakespeare’s plays; this, in itself, is a serious measure of his reputation. But they may not have been in the majority. The audience in the hall of the Middle Temple was presumably rowdy and quite possibly drunken. If they wished for bawdy humour and broad farce, then Twelfth Night would have satisfied them. It took its name from the “Twelfth Day” festivals that were well known for their riotousness, and it had an effervescent mood of continual gaiety that did not dip once. The story of Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, of Malvolio and Feste, was awash with innuendo and suggestion. The fact that Viola dressed as a boy, while being acted by a boy, added an element of sexual frisson that would not have been lost upon the members of the Inn. It may be that the convention of boys playing female roles was in fact the context for obscenity and suggestion that do not appear in the written texts. The language of the wooing scenes was in any case erotically charged, and might well have been complemented by “wanton” gestures. The layers of strange multisexual loving delighted Shakespeare.
There are also numerous legal puns and quibbles in Twelfth Night that would have found responsive hearers. A literal interpretation of the title, of course, would imply that it had first been performed on the afternoon of 6 January 1602. So it is unlikely that the performance in the Middle Temple was the first. It would have suited the Globe, and there are remarkably few stage-properties to be accommodated.
It can be assumed that Armin played Feste, and as a result Feste is given four songs, three of which have entered the national repertoire—“O Mistris mine where are you roming?” “Come away, come away death,” and “When that I was and a little tine boy.” Twelfth Night is suffused with music. It begins and ends in music. Shakespeare has used the advent of Armin, and perhaps the acoustic resources of the Globe, to explore a new range of theatrical effect. It is more than possible that the dramatist himself played Malvolio; as has already been suggested, Malvolio’s crossed yellow garters may have been a farcical version of Shakespeare’s own coat of arms.2 There are many topical allusions in Twelfth Night, but one of the most prominent must surely concern the scenes between Feste and Malvolio. Feste represents the spirit of festival and entertainment, for example, whereas the rancorous Malvolio is described as a Puritan. Their conflict represents one of the oldest and most divisive controversies of the period, with the Puritan faction ranged against plays and playhouses as agents of the devil.
The Puritans opposed the playhouses on a number of levels. Playhouses competed with the pulpits in the matter of public instruction or, as one moralist put it, “the Playe houses are pestered when the churches are naked.” 3 The dramas were considered to be the entertainment of idle people, gapers and lookers-on who ought to be more profitably employed in the afternoons. The actors were deemed to encourage ready emotionalism; they relied upon sexuality and sexual innuendo, especially with the pretty boys dressed as girls who excited lascivious passions; they were subversive of hierarchies, dressed as princes in one scene and as commoners in the next. They were in any case acting, counterfeiting God’s image; it was a form of primitive idolatry, that only papists could enjoy.
It is also possible to go from the general to the particular. It has been suggested that Malvolio was based upon a “real” original, one Sir William Knollys, the Comptroller of the Royal Household, but all such allusions have long since been lost. Yet there can be no doubt that Shakespeare often had certain contemporaries in mind, when inventing characters, and that the actors deliberately impersonated them in their parts. He never knowingly neglected a source of amusement for the London crowd.
That popular success meant that he had become a relatively affluent man. It may be that his purse had been enlarged by his father’s recent death but, whatever the source of his funds, he paid the large amount of £320 for more Stratford land. On 1 May 1602, he purchased from John and William Combe 107 acres of arable land and 20 acres of pasture in the hamlets of Bishopstone and Welcombe. He knew the Combes very well, and he knew the land in question very well. He was now, in the words of his Hamlet, “spacious in the possession of durt” (3356-7). It is doubtful whether he took so ironical an attitude towards his own property. Three years later he purchased even more land. Earlier in Hamlet he betrays his interest in the subject, when the prince of Denmark holds up a skull, and remarks that “this fellowe might be in’s time a great buyer of Land, with his Statuts, his recognisances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoucers” (3072-4). The buying of land in the late sixteenth century was indeed a tiresome and complex business; it was natural for Shakespeare to express his frustration, even through the mouth of the melancholy Dane. In the autumn of 1602 he also bought a plot of half an acre of land, with a cottage and cottage garden, in Chapel Lane just behind his grand house of New Place. The cottage may have been intended for a servant and family, or even for a gardener. Or could it possibly have been a place in which he might seclude himself?
He was clearly aiming for local respectability as well as prosperity. The corporation of Stratford, however, were not necessarily sympathetic to the sources of his wealth. At the end of this year they formally forbade the performance of plays or interludes in the guildhall. It was a manifestation of the regional Puritanism that affected other districts of the country. The fact that he began to spend more time, and money, in Stratford suggests that he was not much concerned about such matters. His life as dramatist, and his life as townsman, were separate and not to be confused.
Part VIII. The King’s Men
James I depicted on the title page of Mischeefes Mysterie
or Treasons Master-peece, the Powder-plot. Shakespeare’s Macbeth
was written during the aftermath of the attempt by
Robert Catesby with Guy Fawkes and other conspirators
to blow up king and parliament.
CHAPTER 74. Hee Is Something Peeuish That Way
Shakespeare was on stage their last parts before the ageing queen. They performed at Whitehall on 26 December 1602 and at Richmond on 7 February 1603. Six weeks later Elizabeth was dead, worn out by age and power. In the last stages of her life she had refused to lie down and rest but had stood for days, her finger in her mouth, pondering upon the fate of sovereigns. The theatres had been closed five days before her death, since plays were not appropriate in the dying time.
By many, including the imprisoned Southampton, she was considered to be a tyrant who had exercised power for too long. Shakespeare was at the time criticised for writing no encomium on the dead queen — not one “sable teare” dropped from his “honied muse” as part of the national exequies. He had been asked to sing the “Rape” of Elizabeth “done by that Tarquin, Death,”1 with reference to his earlier Rape of Lucrece, but he declined the honour. There was a ballad of the moment exhorting “you poets all”2 to lament the queen. Shakespeare was at the head of the list of the poets invoked, among them Ben Jonson, but he made no response. In truth he had no real reason to mourn the queen’s passing. She had beheaded Essex and several members of Essex’s affinity whom Shakespeare knew very well.