Shakespeare

CHAPTER 33 An’t Please Your Honor Players

In the summer of 1592 the newly formed Pembroke’s Men were obliged to leave London. The available records suggest that the plague of this year was particularly virulent in the neighbourhood of Shoreditch where Burbage, Shakespeare and other players lived. The exact route of this late summer tour is not completely known, but there is a record of Pembroke’s Men playing at Leicester as one “stop” in a more extended tour that must have included Coventry, Warwick — and Stratford-upon-Avon. We may say with some confidence that Shakespeare was reunited with his family in the late summer of 1592.

Shakespeare and his companions travelled in a wagon, the players packed in with the baskets containing the costumes and with the essential stage properties. One of the actors of Pembroke’s Men, mortally ill in that summer, was obliged to sell his share of “apparell newe boughte.”¹ They might manage, at best, approximately thirty miles per day. It was an uncomfortable and overcrowded mode of travelling, but the alternative was to walk. One of the stage directions in The Taming of a Shrew is “Enter two of the players with packs at their backs, and a boy.” It is possible that some players took their horses with them, but the cost of upkeep on an extended tour was very high. They lodged at inns for the night, and played there for the price of their beds and suppers. This manner of life, difficult and uncertain in many respects, did have the virtue of encouraging a sense of fraternity among the actors. They were an extended family. It may even have become, for Shakespeare, a welcome substitute for his existing one.

They took with them trumpets and drums, to announce their arrival in every new town. They had to present the burgesses with a paper authorising them to perform, and a letter or some authority from the Earl of Pembroke to prove that they were not sturdy beggars to be whipped out of town. The mayor or chief magistrate then asked them to perform before a selected audience, for which a reward would generally be given. Only then were they granted permission to play in the inn-yards or in the guildhall. There were purpose-built playhouses, however, in larger places such as Bristol and York.

So Shakespeare came to know Ipswich and Coventry, Norwich and Gloucester, in the course of approximately twenty years of intermittent travelling “on the road.” The company with which he was associated for most of his career, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, travelled extensively in East Anglia and Kent but they also journeyed to Carlisle and Newcastle upon Tyne, Plymouth and Exeter, Winchester and Southampton. They visited altogether some eighty towns and thirty noble households, even making the journey up to Edinburgh. This was an important aspect of Shakespeare’s experience of the world. In the summer and autumn of 1592 it may have been the only viable means of earning a living.

But Pembroke’s Men were not simply a group of travelling players. They were invited to perform before the queen during this Christmas season, a signal honour for a company so recently established. They attained this degree of recognition in part because of the acting of Richard Burbage; but their success may have also been connected with the plays which they performed. Among these, as we have seen, were The Taming of a Shrew, Titus Andronicus and the two plays on the reign of Henry VI. We may now conclude that Shakespeare had achieved some renown on his own part, perhaps among his fellows rather than the spectators who flocked to see the plays, not least because he was bitterly attacked in this year by Robert Greene.

In the autumn of 1592 Greene’s autobiographical pamphlet, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million, of Repentance, condemned “that only Shake-scene in a countrey” who “supposes he is able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.” This suggests an element of rivalry and competitiveness in Shakespeare’s nature. The “best of you” refers to the university playwrights, among them Marlowe, Nashe and Greene himself. It was, in other words, a continuation of that war of words which Nashe and Greene had begun three years before.

Greene describes his rival as one of “those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours.” He is saying that Shake-scene was a player — moreover a player who had acted in the dramas of Greene and his contemporaries — and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. Because the young Shakespeare was one of the few who attained the dual role of actor and playwright, Greene berates him as “an absolute Johannes factotum” or jack-of-all-trades. He also intimates that, having supplied Shakespeare with lines (either acted or purloined), he had on his death-bed now been “forsaken.”“Trust them not,” he warns, and calls Shakespeare an “vpstart Crow beautified with our feathers” whose “Tygers hart”(an allusion to The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York) is “wrapt inn a Players hyde.” Accused of being an unlearned (“vpstart”) plagiarist, Shakespeare would have questioned “unlearned”—although he had not attended university, his plays are stuffed with classical allusions — but he could hardly deny the charge of plagiarism; his early plays were bedecked with lines and echoes from Marlowe.

The charge throws a suggestive light on a little fable that Greene included in his pamphlet, which immediately succeeded the assault upon “Shake-scene” and concerned the ant and the grasshopper. Greene compared himself to the grasshopper, and we are left to wonder who the ant might be. The ant was prudent and thrifty, taking up “what winters prouision was scattered in the way” where the grasshopper was unthrifty and careless. When winter came the grasshopper, quite without provisions, begged help from the comfortably ensconced ant. But the ant scorned his requests for aid, and blamed the grasshopper for his lack of effort and refusal to work. The grasshopper characterised the ant in these terms:

The greedy miser thirsteth still for gaine,

His thrift is theft, his weale works others woe …

The charge is again that of theft or plagiarism, but the ant is also condemned as a “greedy miser.” There is also an indirect allusion to “an Vsurer.” In a later period of his life, as we shall see, Shakespeare hoarded essential provisions at time of dearth; he also acted as a money-lender or money-broker on certain occasions and he possessed a healthy respect for money, as his own commercial speculations will prove. So Greene’s attack, over-heated and exaggerated as it is, might well have been recognised as a further assault upon Shakespeare’s character. In this account he is thrifty to the point of miserliness, hard-working and inclined to scorn those who are not. “Toyling labour,” the ant states, “hates an idle guest.” It is a plausible description of the young man on the rise in London. It is certainly true that, in his drama, Shakespeare continually satirises indolence and self-indulgence.

There is another anecdote in the same pamphlet when Greene, under the pseudonym of Roberto, is approached by a player of rich and fashionable appearance. He confesses to being once a “country Author” but, as Greene says, “I tooke you rather for a Gentleman of great liuing, for if by outward habit men should be censured, I tell you, you would be taken for a substantiall man.” The newly elevated actor agrees, and confesses that “my very share in playing apparel will not be sold for two hundred pounds.”“Truly,” Greene replies, “’tis straunge that you should so prosper in that vayne practise, for that it seems to me your voice is nothing gratious.” By “gratious” is here meant courtly or refined. So perhaps he was a quondam “country Author” still with a country accent. The passage may or may not refer to Shakespeare, becoming affluent and successful, but it is at least an indication of how actors were deemed to prosper in London.