Shakespeare

Shakespeare was later to parody Peek’s bombast in his history plays, and there may have been some cause for disagreement between the two men. Peele, the son of a London charity school clerk, was proud of his education at Oxford and his status as Master of Arts. Yet it was difficult for even a university-educated dramatist to make his way in the capital; there were too many clerkly writers and too many claimants to noble purses. There is every reason to suppose that young writers were attracted to London because of the rise of the playhouses there, but expectations of plenty are not always rewarded. So Peele tried his hand at various kinds of verse and drama – translations, university plays, pastorals, patriotic shows, biblical plays and comedies. Like literary young men of any and every period, he had to make money whatever way he could; he could have come out of George Gissing’s New Grub Street rather than a sixteenth-century chapbook.

Like literary young men in London, too, he and his contemporaries tended to congregate together. In his lifetime Peele was associated with Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene – all of them “university wits,” spirited, reckless, drunken, promiscuous, wild, and in the case of Marlowe dangerous. As Nashe said of his erstwhile companions, “wee scoffe and are iocund, when the sword is ready to goe through us; on our wine-benches we bid a Fico for tenne thousand plagues.” 3They were the roaring boys of the 1580s and 1590s, doomed to early deaths from drink or the pox. It would be mistaken to view them as some coterie, but they were part of the same literary (and social) tendency. Shakespeare knew them well enough, but there is no evidence that he consorted with them. He had too great a respect for his own genius, and thus a much greater sense of self-preservation. He was too sane to destroy himself – or, rather, he had a much greater need for permanence and stability. It is not known how Peele reacted to a collaboration with this apparently uneducated young actor from the country, but it provoked fury and resentment in at least one of his university colleagues.

So the stage was always ready for new voices. Even as Lyly was being performed at court and in the undercroft of St. Paul’s Cathedral, there were new dramas and new dramatists coming into the ascendant. Shakespeare entered London at a moment of dramatic revelation. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy had caused something of a sensation, and it was swiftly followed by Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. The Spanish Tragedy inaugurated the fashion for revenge tragedy on the London stage; it directly inspired a very early version of Hamlet , which there is some reason to suppose was written by the young Shakespeare. The Spanish Tragedy has many parallels with the more famous play. It has a ghost; it has a variety of murders; it has scenes of madness, real and feigned; it stages a play within a play that promotes revenge; it has a great deal of blood. Unlike the later version of Hamlet , however, it is suffused by an unvarying rhetoric of vengeance and retribution that thrilled its first auditors. It was an immensely powerful and seductive language filled with sensationalist imagery. It became a form of secular liturgy. When Hieronimo advances upon the stage, in a state of undress, he calls out (II, v, 1-2):

What outcries pluck me from my naked bed,

And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear?

The lines became catchphrases, repeated and parodied by other dramatists. They were picked up and redeployed by Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus , when Titus appears in a similarly discomposed state to cry: “Who doth molest my contemplation?” (2106).

Kyd himself was still a young man when he wrote the play. He was born in 1558, just six years before Shakespeare, and was the son of a London scrivener; like Shakespeare he endured a relatively brief education at grammar school, and seems then to have entered his father’s trade. Little is known about him because, as a writer for the playhouses, little was required to be known. One of the few references to him is that of “industrious Kyd,” which suggests that he wrote a great deal for his daily bread. He seems to have begun his career as a playwright for the Queen’s Men in 1583, but by 1587 he and Christopher Marlowe had both entered the service of Lord Strange’s Men. Shakespeare may have followed them. The Spanish Tragedy was enacted by that company, as was Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris .

It is important to note that playwriting was a young man’s occupation – Kyd and Marlowe being no more than twenty-three or twenty-four (and perhaps even younger) when they began their work. “My first acquaintance with this Marlowe,” Kyd later wrote in an exculpatory letter, “rose upon his bearing name to serve my Lord [Strange] although his Lordship never knewe his service, but in writing for his plaiers.” 4This immediately raises an intriguing possibility. If Shakespeare joined Lord Strange’s Men in 1586, then he would very soon have become acquainted with Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe; he would, as it were, be part of the same affinity of writers. He acted in their plays. He may even have collaborated with them. It has often been observed how, in his earliest dramas, Shakespeare seems alternately to imitate and parody both dramatists. What could be more natural in a junior member of this confraternity than to copy those whom he was ambitious to succeed? It was the time, after all, of their maximum effectiveness and success. The Spanish Tragedy was so popular that it propagated a number of imitations and was revised in 1602, after the playwright’s death, with additions by Ben Jonson. So for almost twenty years it remained part of the staple fare of theatrical entertainment. What else would the young Shakespeare do but copy it?

There was one other association between Kyd and Shakespeare. Neither had been to university. As products of the grammar school only, they were both criticised by the “university wits” for their lack of learning. They were condemned by Nashe, Greene and other graduates as ex-scriveners or ex-schoolmasters, in terms that make it very difficult to know which of the two is being addressed. So there was a connection.

It was a small and intense world. These young dramatists stole lines and characters from one another. They criticised one another. Their plays were put on in competition, one with another, like the works of the Greek tragedians. The success of The Spanish Tragedy in 1586 seems to have inspired, or provoked, Marlowe into writing another play of bombastic eloquence. The two parts of Tamburlaine were acted at the end of the following year, but the speed of production and performance suggests that Marlowe had already written the plays in outline. They did constitute a revolution in English drama, however, but like other young artists Marlowe quickly acquired notoriety for his life as much as for his art. He was generally regarded as an atheist, a blasphemer and a pederast. He had become, after his first success upon the stage, a notorious renegade.

He was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker who was first shaped by the same kind of grammar-school training that Shakespeare experienced at Stratford; but, unlike Shakespeare, he moved on to university. Even before he attained his degree, however, he was involved in some kind of clandestine government activity. Like the salamander he seemed to live and thrive in fire. His comments, repeated at second hand, were themselves incendiary. He is supposed to have said that “all protestantes are Hypocritical asses” and “all they love not Tobacco and Boies were fooles.” He has been associated with the “school of night,” as we have observed, and is reported to have remarked that “Moyses was but a Jugler amp; that one Heriots being Sir W Raleighs man Can do more than he.” Heriot and Raleigh were members of that esoteric society. Marlowe was also engaged in various forms of surveillance activity, particularly in regard to Catholics, but it is not at all clear whether he was a government agent, a double agent, or both. He was not in any case someone to be trusted. In 1589 he and another “university wit,” Thomas Watson, were assailed by the son of an innkeeper; Watson stabbed the man to death, with the result that Watson and Marlowe were consigned to prison. Both Watson and Marlowe lived and worked in the theatre district of Shoreditch, which is perhaps where the young Shakespeare encountered them.