Shakespeare

When all was settled they took a boat downriver from one of the London wharves or “stairs,” with an attendant barge for their costumes and devices. The great hall at Greenwich had been cleared for the performance; the stage was at one end, decked out with perspective scenery devised by the Office of the Revels, and the royal dais was at the other. The hall, on this later winter afternoon and evening, was illuminated by candles and torches. The musicians were placed on the wooden balcony above the stage, and the actors could use the passage behind the screen as their “tiring-room.” The audience, invited at royal discretion, assembled in their formal robes before the arrival of the queen herself. It was the most fashionable entertainment of the year, and it would have been natural for Shakespeare and his fellows to experience a little nervousness. The names of the plays they performed on this occasion are not recorded, but it has been suggested that the queen witnessed Love’s Labour’s Lost as well as Romeo and Juliet . What better fillip for an ageing queen than tales of young lovers?

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were a success, and became something of a royal favourite. The extant records show that on this first occasion the Lord Admiral’s Men performed three times, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played twice, but in later years the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were called more often. In the winter season of 1596 and 1597, for example, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played six times and the Lord Admiral’s Men did not appear at all. A reference to William Shakespeare occurs in the payment for the royal entertainment at Greenwich in 1594, when £20 was granted to “William Kemp, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage” for “two comedies showed before Her Majesty in Christmas time last.” It is an indication of Shakespeare’s seniority in the company that he should be listed before the principal actor – unless, of course, he was the principal actor. It suggests in any case that he was a leading member at the time of its inception, and already active in the company’s business. The entry in the treasurer’s account has the distinction of being the only official reference to Shakespeare’s connection with the stage.

On the night of the last day they performed at Greenwich, 28 December 1594, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men also gave a performance of The Comedy of Errors in the hall of Gray’s Inn. The play was part of the Christmas revels of that Inn, presided over by a lord of misrule known as “the Prince of Purpoole.” Shakespeare may have been chosen as the dramatist through his association with Southampton; Southampton was a member of Gray’s Inn. The play of twins and of mistaken identity, with all the complications of evidence involved, was naturally popular among students of the English law. For the purposes of the Inn, Shakespeare also revised The Comedy of Errors . He introduced more legalisms and two trial scenes. A special stage had been built for the production, as well as “Scaffolds to be reared to the top of the House, to increase Expectation.” So there was to be an element of spectacle in the proceedings. But the play hardly received a fair hearing. The numbers of invited guests were so large, and the event so badly managed, that the entertainments had to be curtailed. The senior members of the Inner Temple, who had been invited by their colleagues, left the hall “discontented and displeased”; spectators then invaded the stage to the obvious detriment of the players. A report in Gesta Grayorum concludes that “that Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors”. Two days later the members held a “mock trial,” one of the enduring features of the Inns, at which “a Company of base and common Fellows” from “Shoreditch” was berated for making up “our Disorders with a Play of Errors and Confusions.” 2It was not a serious rebuke, and the allusion to the “base and common” actors is an arch legal joke. The person blamed for the fiasco was in fact a member and “orator” of the Inn, Francis Bacon, a keen spectator of the drama and a writer sometimes deemed to have composed Shakespeare’s plays himself. The contemporaneity of the two men has itself led to “nothing but confusion and errors.” Shakespeare has been accused of writing Bacon, and Bacon accused of writing Shakespeare, while a third party has been held responsible for the productions of both men.

The connection between the legal Inns and the drama is a very close one. Many of the poets and dramatists of the age were attached to one of the four Inns of Court – Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple – and it has plausibly been asserted that formal English drama itself originated in those surroundings. One of the earliest of English tragedies, Gorboduc , was written by two members of the Inner Temple and first performed at the Inns of Court. The “moots” or mock trials, as well as the legal debates and dialogues that were performed by the students, bear an interesting relation to the short interludes of the early sixteenth century. The Inns were also famous for their organisation of masques and pageants; the writers of these masques then began to write for the boy actors of the private theatres, St. Paul’s and Blackfriars. The Middle and the Inner Temple were next door to the theatre at Blackfriars. There is contiguity as well as continuity.

The legal ceremonies at the courts in Westminster Hall of course involved their own kind of theatre. Lawyers, like actors, had to learn the arts of rhetoric and of performance. It was known as “putting the case.” In the course of their disputations the students of law were instructed to assume the voices of different characters in order to promulgate different arguments; they were taught how to frame narratives that might include improbabilities or impossibilities in order to lend conviction to their suasoria and controversia . At a certain stage in their respective developments, then, the set speeches of English drama and the oratorical persuasions of English law looked very much alike. In sixteenth-century London, as in fifth-century BC Athens, public performance was always seen in terms of competition and contest.

In certain of his plays Shakespeare introduces references and allusions that were understood only by the students of the law; they in fact formed a large or at least recognisable part of his audience. They were the “coming men,” trained to be the judges and administrators and diplomats of the next generation. Many of Shakespeare’s own friends and acquaintances came from that circle. It was also widely reported, and believed, that the members of the Inns harboured papistical tendencies; Lord Burghley was obliged in 1585 to write to the treasurer of Gray’s Inn, for example, complaining that “to our great grief we have understood that not only some seminary popish priests have heretofore been harboured in Gray’s Inn but also have their assemblies and masses.” 3

The members of the Inns were known as “Afternoon’s Men” for their habit of frequenting the playhouse in those hours, and were described by one contemporary as the “clamorous fry” who stood with the groundlings in the pit or “filled up the private rooms of greater price.” 4A moralist, William Prynne, stated that “this is one of the first things they learne as soone as they are admitted, to see Stage-playes.” 5One judgement in the civic courts charges a member of Gray’s Inn “for that he brought a disordered company of gentlemen of the Inns of Court” 6to the playhouse. They were clamorous because they hissed and booed with their fellows in the pit, but they were also known for shouting out themes or topics to be addressed by the actors; the actors would then extemporise comically or wittily. This was an extension of their practice at their “moots” in the Inns, and is again an indication of the association between law and drama in London.