Shakespeare

Lord Strange was only five years older than Shakespeare, and from a relatively early age gained a reputation for learning and for artistry. In Colin-Clout’s Come Home Again (442-3), a poem in which Shakespeare himself is mentioned, Edmund Spenser refers both to Lord Strange’s munificent patronage and to his native abilities:

Both did he other, which could pipe, maintaine,

And eke could pipe himself with passing skill.

It is not at all unlikely that he might have spotted the superlative talents of young Shakespeare.

Lord Strange has also been associated with a group of noblemen and scholars who have become known as “the school of night.” It met at Sir Walter Raleigh’s London dwelling, Durham House, and included among its members Raleigh himself, the Earl of Northumberland, George Chapman, George Peele, Thomas Heriot, John Dee and perhaps even Christopher Marlowe. This esoteric group of projectors and speculators engaged in discussion of sceptical philosophy, mathematics, chemistry and navigation. They were taunted with atheism and blasphemy, but they were in effect part of the speculative and adventurous spirit of the period in which mathematics and occultism were seen as aspects of the same great design. Shakespeare possibly alludes to them in Love’s Labour’s Lost , a play that was written as a kind of “in-house” entertainment. Although he was not a member of the “school of night,” he knew its purposes.

Lord Strange had been a contemporary of the precocious and witty playwright John Lyly, at Oxford, and numbered among his acquaintance what might be called a theatrical “set.” Christopher Marlowe claimed to be “very well known” to him. 7This is not hard to believe, since Lord Strange’s Men performed Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris . Thomas Nashe in Pierce Penniless praised Strange as “this renowned Lord, to whom I owe the utmost powers of my love and duty.” Strange was also well acquainted with Thomas Kyd, whose The Spanish Tragedy was part of his players’ repertoire. Since versions of Shakespeare’s plays also became part of that repertoire, we may safely conclude that there is some connection between these playwrights. It seems likely that Shakespeare acted in The Jew of Malta and The Spanish Tragedy . He was part of the same group.

It was perhaps a chance of cultural history that this particular collection of young men arose in the same period, and became dedicated to the same new profession. There are other parallels to this sudden burst of efflorescence and magnificent achievement – among English poets, for example, in the late fourteenth century and in the late eighteenth century. In the popular imagination Shakespeare stands alone and inviolable among his contemporaries – quiet, gentle, modest, perhaps rather retiring. But is the popular imagination altogether correct? Instead we will begin to see him as part of a competitive and restless world, where the palm was awarded to the shrewdest, the most energetic and the most persevering.

Strange was also considered to be Catholic or crypto-Catholic, and around him grew a network of suspicion, espionage and intrigue. In 1593 Richard Hesketh delivered a letter to Strange, by then Earl of Derby, asking him to stand as leader of a plot against the queen; Strange surrendered Hesketh to the authorities, but died suddenly in the following year. His unexpected death was popularly ascribed to witchcraft or to poisoning. Is it any wonder that Shakespeare steered clear of contemporary factions and quarrels?

In 1572 two Acts of Parliament materially affected the status of the players. The earlier of them, promulgated in January, restricted the number of retainers that any nobleman might keep in his service. It was a device by which Elizabeth and her advisers hoped to curb the power of over-mighty lords, but it had an effect upon certain troupes of actors who were cut adrift from noble patronage. So James Burbage wrote to the Earl of Leicester, asking him to reaffirm his patronage of his players.

The urgency of his request is explained by the second Act of Parliament of 1572, which set down conditions for “the punishment of Vagabondes”; among such vagabonds were included “all fencers, bear-wards, common players in interludes, amp; minstrels, not belonging to any Baron of the realm or towards any other personage of greater degree.” 1If you were not a retainer of a great lord, you could be whipped and burned through the ear. So these were the conditions that created the new world of players that Shakespeare entered. By force of necessity they had grouped themselves around certain settled employers or patrons. They were also searching for fixed and stable premises where they might perform in London. It was a way of acquiring respectability and of escaping legal punishment. The stratagem was not completely successful – actors and playwrights were routinely hauled before investigations or consigned to prison – but in hindsight it can be seen as a first step in the creation of the London theatrical world and the eventual emergence of the “West End.”

When Shakespeare arrived in London there were several familiar venues for theatrical performances. The oldest of them were the inns or, rather, large rooms within inns which would otherwise have been used for meetings or assemblies. There is a belief that inn-yards, with covered galleries all around them, were the first public theatres; but a moment’s consideration reveals the impracticality of such an arrangement. Inn-yards were places where travellers arrived, where horses were tethered, and where supplies were delivered: places of public ingress and egress. These are not the ideal circumstances for public performances. The only exception occurred in an inn such as the Black Bull, where there was an extra yard connected to the rear yard by a covered alley.

There must have been many more places for performance than are currently known, but a few have been recorded for posterity. The Cross Keys was in Gracechurch Street, where Lord Strange’s Men performed, and the Bell Inn was on the same street. The Belsavage was located on Ludgate Hill, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street and the Boar’s Head was on the north side of Whitechapel Street beyond Aldgate. It is not clear how much they resembled theatres rather than inns; it seems likely, given the continuities of London life, that they were close to the early nineteenth-century “musical saloons” or “music halls” where drink or “wet money” was served to paying customers. Certainly it would be a mistake to think of them as inns that simply put on plays as additional entertainment. The Boar’s Head, for example, had erected a permanent theatrical space on its premises, and for the Earl of Worcester’s Men “the house called the Bores head is the place they haue especially vsed and doe best like of.” 2Some of the earliest companies employed, for a stage, wooden planks placed across beer barrels that had been roped together. The great companies worked in the inns, and one contemporary described “the two prose books played at the Bel-savage, where you shall never find a word without wit, never a line without pith, never a letter placed in vain.” 3These are precisely the places where Shakespeare learned his craft at first hand.

By the time of Shakespeare’s arrival, however, there were at least four large structures built as general resorts for entertainment in which the theatre took its place alongside wrestling and bear-baiting. The first ever recorded in London documents, the Red Lion at Mile End, had been constructed in 1567 by John Brayne, citizen and grocer, as a financial speculation. Since he was also brother-in-law to James Burbage, there may have been some family interest in profiting from various forms of public entertainment. James Burbage began as a player but, in the changed circumstances of city life, he became a noted theatrical entrepreneur and father of the celebrated actor who played many of Shakespeare’s most important roles. He was one of those skilful businessmen who seem to sense the movement of the time.