Shakespeare

When they returned to London later in 1593 they were less fortunate. The Theatre, and the other playhouses, were still closed by “the sickness.” It was late June, or early July, and the summer heat was approaching. In this year the epidemic disorder killed fifteen thousand Londoners, more than one-tenth of the population. While on tour in Bath, Edward Alleyn wrote to his wife instructing her “every evening throwe water before your dore and in your bakesid [back of the house] and haue in your windowes good store of rue and herbe of grace.” 1

Something else was happening in London. Threats against French, Dutch and Belgian immigrants had been pasted or nailed on the streets. On 5 May a bitterly xenophobic poem of fifty-three lines had been placed on the walls of the Dutch churchyard. It had been signed “Tamburlaine.” Not unnaturally, perhaps, these attacks were considered to be the work of professional writers. So the authors of these “lewd and malicious libels” were to be arrested and examined; if they refused to confess “you shal by auctorities hereof put them to the torture in Bridewel, and by th’extremitie thereof.” 2One of the first arrested was the author of The Spanish Tragedy , Thomas Kyd, who was duly put to the torture. He named Christopher Marlowe as a blasphemer. It has been suggested that the entire affair was an elaborate trap by the authorities to snare Kyd and, through Kyd, to detain Marlowe himself. 3Marlowe was called and examined by the Privy Council for two days; he was then released, on condition that he reported daily to their lordships. Ten days later he was dead, stabbed through the eye as a result of an apparent brawl in Deptford. Kyd himself died in the following year. It is hard to overestimate the impact of these events on the fraternity of players. One of their leading playwrights had been killed, in most suspicious circumstances, and another had been tortured almost to death at the instigation of the Privy Council. It was a series of shocking events, of which no one could see the outcome. The uncertainty and anxiety were intense, the fearfulness rendered even worse by the prevalence of the plague and the closure of the theatres.

But there was one other consideration for Shakespeare. The death of Marlowe occurred while he was on tour with Pembroke’s Men, but the report reached him soon enough. This was for him a climactic event. The dramatic poet whom he most admired and imitated was dead. To put it more bluntly, his principal competitor was dead. From this time forward he would have a clear run. It is perhaps not surprising that his great lyrical plays- Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Richard II – emerge in the succeeding four years. In these plays he exorcises, and surpasses, Marlowe’s poetical spirit. The untimely death of Marlowe left Shakespeare as the principal playwright of note in late sixteenth-century London.

The continuation of the plague throughout the summer, however, obliged Pembroke’s Men to tour again. They sold their text of Marlowe’s Edward the Second to a stationer, William Jones, no doubt to raise a modest but necessary sum. The sensation of his death might encourage sales. Then they travelled into the south of England, where they played at Rye for the relatively small sum of 13 s 4 d . They came back to London in August, and disbanded. They were bankrupt and could no longer cover their costs. On 28 September Henslowe wrote to Edward Alleyn, who was also still “on the road”: “As for my lord of Pembroke’s, which you desire to know where they may be, they are all at home, and have been this five or six weeks; for they cannot save their charges with travel, as I hear, and were fain to pawn the apparel.” 4

So Shakespeare was out of employment. But it is not to be believed that such an enterprising and energetic young man would remain idle for very long. With the closure of the theatres at the beginning of the year he must already have been considering the future. Who could tell if, or when, the plague would abate? Would the doors of the London theatres be closed for ever? He must have given serious thought to a possible change in the direction of his career, since in this period he began work on a long poem. From an early stage, too, he may have had in mind the possible benefits accruing from a wealthy patron. Such a patron might offer him employment, in the lean time of the theatres, as well as gifts. Thus in the summer of 1593 his old Stratford acquaintance, Richard Field, published a volume entitled Venus and Adonis . It was priced at about 6 pence, and sold at the sign of the White Greyhound in the haunt of booksellers at Paul’s Churchyard. Field’s shop was no doubt Shakespeare’s haunt, also, where he would have found the new books of the day – among them George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie . That treatise had recommended the six-line stanza for English narrative poems, precisely the form that Shakespeare employed in Venus and Adonis . In Field’s shop he would have seen fresh copies of Plutarch’s Lives as translated by Sir Thomas North but, equally significantly, he would have been able to read and perhaps to borrow Field’s new edition of Ovid. He took two lines from that poet as his epigraph for Venus and Adonis . The little shop in Paul’s Churchyard, smelling of ink and paper, helped to give birth to one of the most fluent and eloquent of all English narrative poems.

No author was named on its title-page, but its dedication was signed “Your Honour’s in all duty, William Shakespeare”; the dedicatee himself was a young nobleman by the name of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. This dedication is the first example of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic prose to have survived.

The first sentence alone reveals his mastery of cadence and of emphasis.

Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my vnpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the worlde will censure mee for choosing so strong a proppe to support so weake a burthen, onelye if your Honour seeme but pleased, I account my selfe highly praised, and vowe to take aduantage of all idle houres, till I have honoured you with some grauer labour.

He continues by calling this poem “the first heire of my inuention.” None of his plays had yet been published under his own name, and anonymous play-books would certainly not count as evidence of his “invention.” He seems, curiously enough, to distance himself from his career in the theatre. His epigraph from Ovid begins with the phrase “Vilia miretur vulgus” which, in Marlowe’s translation, reads “Let base-conceited wits admire vile things.” “Vilia” can also mean “common shows,” of which the public drama was a notable example in sixteenth-century London. Shakespeare says that he will be led by Apollo to the springs of the Muses, thus severing his connection with the “vilia” of the playhouses. Biographers have suggested that the lines represent a certain ambiguity, or uncertainty, about his role as a playwright and actor. Neither was, after all, the profession of a gentleman. But it is more likely that Shakespeare was indulging in special pleading. With the dedication to Venus and Adonis he was simply entering his new role as poet, and aspirant to noble patronage, by means of a flourish. He was making a good impression. And it should never be forgotten that, throughout his life, Shakespeare remained very much an actor assuming the necessary or congenial part.

Southampton was then twenty years old, having completed the formalities of an education at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and at Gray’s Inn. He came from a noble Catholic family but, on the death of his father, he had become a ward of Lord Burghley the Lord Treasurer. At the age of sixteen he had been repeatedly pressed to marry Burghley’s granddaughter, but had refused. Venus and Adonis , the story of the unwelcome wooing of a pretty boy by an older woman, might even have been conceived for Southampton. It might be seen as a follow-up to a poem entitled Narcissus , in which one of Burghley’s secretaries had indirectly chided Southampton for his solitary state. The young lord might plausibly be identified with Adonis because by common consent he was as beautiful as he was learned, although the magnitude of both qualities was no doubt exaggerated by the panegyrists of the time. Noble youths were always deemed more attractive than their less wellborn counterparts. Like many young Elizabethans of noble descent Southampton’s generosity of spirit (and of his means) was matched by instability and passionate temper; the queen herself commented that he was “one whose counsel can be of little, and experience of less use.” 5