He lost interest in certain plot lines after he had introduced them. Nothing, for example, is made of the Princess’s early demands for the territory of Aquitaine in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The business between Lorenzo and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice is left unresolved. In that play, too, it is clear that Shakespeare gained interest in Shylock while at the same time noticeably losing enthusiasm for Antonio. Antonio opens the play in an intriguingly melancholy style, but thereafter is never properly developed. The public context of Coriolanus is rapidly succeeded by private communings; the character of Hamlet is transformed in the last two acts of the play. Of course it could be argued that these were long-considered decisions on Shakespeare’s part, but they bear all the hallmarks of improvisation and spontaneous invention.
CHAPTER 48
So shaken as We Are,
So Wan with Care
In the summer of 1595 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men went on tour. In June they were at Ipswich and at Cambridge, in each place receiving the not inconsiderable sum of 40 shillings. There had been a time when a university town such as Cambridge had shunned the presence of common players, but their status and prestige had risen. William Shakespeare already had, as we have seen, an eager audience among the educated young; it is not too much to suggest that he might have been a “draw” for the members of the various colleges.
They had left London for the very good reason that the theatres had once again been closed. There had been a number of food riots, over the soaring costs of fish and butter, in the late spring and early summer; there were twelve affrays in June alone. The apprentices had taken over the market in Southwark, and then subsequently the market at Billingsgate, to sell the staples of food at what they considered to be an appropriate rate. Then, on 29 June, a thousand London apprentices marched on Tower Hill to pillage the shops of the gun-makers there, clearly with nefarious intent. The pillories in Cheapside had been torn down, and a makeshift gallows was erected outside the house of the Lord Mayor. There were pamphlets circulated on the “rebellious tumults” and in subsequent legal proceedings the apprentices were charged with attempting to “take the sword of auchtoryte”1 from the mayor and aldermen of the city. Five of their leaders were hanged, drawn and quartered, thus incurring an unusually severe punishment. So London was placed under the Elizabethan version of martial law, and of course the theatres were out of action.
The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had in any case begun their career in London during a generally troubled period. One alderman complained to the Privy Council in 1596 of the “great dearth of victual which hath been continued now these three years, besides three years’ plague before.”2 Weavers’ apprentices were part of the summer riots of 1595, and a silk weaver was incarcerated in Bedlam for accusing the mayor of insanity. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bottom, the leader of the artisans, is himself a weaver. It has been suggested that Shakespeare was transforming violence into farce and comedy. Certainly this would resemble his practice on other occasions. There are, of course, many other contemporary allusions in his plays that are now irrecoverable. He may also have taken advantage of the interval of closure to travel back to Stratford: there is a local record of “Mr. Shaxpere” purchasing “one book” from “Jone Perat”3 at the end of August. Aubrey reports on unknown authority that he “was wont to goe to his native Country once a yeare.”4
When the company resumed acting in London at the end of August the Lord Mayor demanded that their resident theatres, the Curtain and the Theatre, should be pulled down in order to avoid the threatening presence of crowds and disorder in that neighbourhood. The virtues of the players, however, were more widely appreciated by the gentry than the City fathers. At the beginning of December Sir Edward Hoby wrote to his first cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, member of the Privy Council, asking “your grace to visit Canon Row; where as late as it shall please you a gate for your supper shall be open, and King Richard present himself to your view.”5 This may allude to a late-night performance of The Tragedy of King Richard III but it has generally been interpreted as referring to The Tragedy of King Richard II that had just lately been written. It is in certain respects a contentious play, concerned as it is with the forced abdication and murder of a legitimate sovereign, and Cecil may have been invited to check its suitability for the court. The scenes directly concerned with those events may have been acted within the lifetime of Elizabeth I, but they were never printed in the period. That would have incurred too great a risk.
The censored play was a popular success, however, with three quarto editions printed in the space of two years; the last two of them included the name of William Shakespeare as author. Its popularity may in fact have helped to promote the life of Richard II in the public imagination. There is a letter from Raleigh to Robert Cecil written in the summer of 1597, shortly before the publication of the play in quarto form, in which he states that “I acquainted my L: generall [the Earl of Essex] with your letter to mee & your kynd acceptance of your enterteynemente, hee was also wonderfull merry at ye consait of Richard the 2.”6 Here the name of the dead king is a joking pseudonym for the living queen.
Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of King Richard II in verse, and it has all the splendour of his lyric impulse. That is why it is associated with A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as Romeo and Juliet. The verse shimmers and soars as the history of England is mingled with enchantment — not the enchantment of legend or of faery, but of a theatrical and lyrical sovereign who laments the end of his reign in soliloquies of dust and desolation. He is the monarch of metaphor and simile. His is in every sense a wonderful performance. Shakespeare has followed the symbolic logic of his dramaturgy by combining king and actor in one role, with all the spectacle and vainglory the combination implies. That is why it is also a play of ritual and rhetoric, with elaborate effects of staging as well as language. Richard finds his deepest being while musing upon his role or part within the world. He is depicted here as a highly self-conscious and dramatic monarch; he is the only person in the play to be granted soliloquies while his enemy and supplanter, Henry Bolingbroke, remains resolutely unyielding and external. The declining king seems to grow in interest as he approaches his defeat and death — or, rather, Shakespeare becomes more interested in his temperament and situation. At the beginning of the play he is depicted as somewhat callous and avaricious but, as he figuratively and literally bends lower to the earth, he inspires some of Shakespeare’s greatest verse. The dramatist is always engaged by failure, especially failure on such a cosmic scale. It summons up all the grace and sympathy of his nature, which may in part be connected with some tenderness towards his father, and in this play he proves himself beyond doubt to be the master of pathos.