Shakespeare

It is worth remarking that Shakespeare started writing parts for “fools” only after Armin had joined the company. Since Armin was also known for his singing voice, Shakespeare wrote many songs for him. From Touchstone forward emerge the fools who break into song. It is a moot point whether Shakespeare fashioned his new “fools” in the image of Armin, or whether Armin’s persona was fashioned by Shakespeare. No doubt both elements were at work in the creation of Touchstone and Feste, the Fool in King Lear and the gravedigger in Hamlet . With their mixture of melancholy and whimsicality, song and learning, mimicry and word-play, wit and proverb, satire and philosophy, they are of a distinctive and instantly recognisable type. Their costumes are motley, and their language is motley.

Armin had studied what were known as “natural fools” and with his instinctive skills in mimicry he had learned to imitate them; so he brought a self-consciousness or interiority to the role of clown that Kempe himself never provided. He did not “ad lib” or make impromptu jokes in the manner of his predecessor; he studied each role with care, and differentiated one from another. That was why he was important to Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. Since Armin played the part of the foul-mouthed and pustular Thersites in Troilus and Cressida , it is clear enough that he could undertake what at a later date would be called “character parts.” He may have played Casca in Julius Caesar , for example, and Caliban in The Tempest . This also makes a difference to the interpretation of Shakespeare’s drama. It is sometimes supposed that Menenius in Coriolanus is the voice of good sense or worldly wisdom; but if he were played by Armin, as has been suggested, he would have become a grotesque.

So he first appears as Touchstone in As You Like It , proclaimed as “Nature’s naturall.” He does not wear the conventional russet outfit of the clown but instead the fool’s costume of motley that included a long coat woven of green and yellow, an eared hood and a baton. For Armin Shakespeare invented the character of Touchstone, without relying upon his usual multifarious sources. He also gave Armin an extensive part, the third largest in the play, with 320 lines of dialogue. In the third act he sings snatches of a song, “Wind away, Be gone, I say,” before he runs off the stage with Audrey. He probably doubled as Amiens – Armin/Amiens – with more lyrical ballads from the repertoire. There are in fact more songs in As You Like It than in any other Shakespearian play, and they are clearly related to the use of Armin as counter-tenor. When, a year later, Armin played the Clown in Twelfth Night he is given a significant compliment (1244-5):

This fellow is wise enough to play the foole,

And to do that well, craues a kinde of wit.

Given the enclosure riots of the period, and the general fear of those who lived in forests as “outlaws” and “robbers,” it would have been relatively easy to turn As You Like It into a satirical portrait of greed and corruption; but he chose another path. By adopting the plot of Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde , he writes charming pastoral satire with the additional figures of Jaques and Touchstone to lend comic depth to the proceedings. He was a literate man who preferred romance to reality. The forest prompts the characters, not into rapine or violence, but into poetry and song. It is a haven for generosity of spirit and for melancholy musing, a place where love is celebrated and confirmed; it is a locale in which the audience witnesses the conversion of evil to good as well as supernatural visitations. The spell of enchantment is upon everything.

Yet it was in many respects a hard and disenchanted age. Satire was very much in the air. Given the macabre atmosphere ‘ around the declining queen, it could hardly fail to be so. The final stages of an ancien régime always provoke black humour. It was the age of Donne’s satires and of such books as Lodge’s Wits Miserie and the Worlds Madness .

On I June 1599 the Archbishop of Canterbury banned all satire in verse. The Privy Council ordered that the number of plays be restricted. But the new vogue for satire came directly to involve Shakespeare in what is known as the “Poets’ War.” Like all internecine conflicts its origins are uncertain, and have as a result been endlessly debated. We may trace a source or origin, however, in John Marston’s association with the Middle Temple and with the choirboys of St. Paul’s who performed dramas in their singing-school by the cathedral.

John Marston had acquired a reputation as a precocious satirist, especially of those older writers who had attained success or renown. One of his earliest productions, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image , was a burlesque upon Venus and Adonis . His satire at Shakespeare’s expense, however, did not prevent him from borrowing or copying extensively from the work of the older dramatist. Marston is a familiar type. Shakespeare already knew him; as a member of the Middle Temple Marston’s father had stood surety for Shakespeare’s cousin, Thomas Greene, to become a member of that institution. For the members of the Middle Temple, in late 1598 or early 1599, Marston wrote a satirical play, Histriomastix , in which he glances unfavourably at both Shakespeare and Jonson.

Ben Jonson, never one to ignore or forgive an offence, then parodied Marston in Every Man out of his Humour . He had some reason to be sensitive. He had already been touched by Shakespeare. In Henry V the character of Nym continually repeats “That’s the humour of it,” a direct echo of Jonson’s favourite theatrical device. In As You Like It the character of Jaques, melancholy and voluble in his “humorous sadness,” has often been taken as a satirical if good-humoured presentation of Jonson himself.

Jonson was a less endearing humorist. In Cynthia’s Revels , in 1600, he pilloried Marston as well as his play-writing colleague, Thomas Dekker; one was “a light, voluptuous reveller” and the other “a strange arrogating puff.” In his next play, The Poetaster , he ridiculed Marston as a hack poet and plagiarist. Marston eventually counter-attacked with What You Will , in which Jonson was lampooned as an arrogant and insolent failure. In his aggressive manner Jonson then challenged Marston to a duel; since he was already branded on the thumb for murder, this was a foolhardy strategy. He probably guessed, however, that Marston would decline the challenge. Jonson then sought his man in the taverns of London, and found him. Marston pulled a pistol, whereupon Jonson took it from him and thrashed him with it. That is the story that went around London. Jonson repeated it later.

Dekker had already returned to the fray in Satiromastix in which Shakespeare is gently lampooned as the lecherous playwright Sir Adam Prickshaft but in which Jonson is more cruelly ridiculed as a failed court dramatist. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men nevertheless agreed to perform Dekker’s Satiromastix . At this point the literary feud ceased to be the “Poets’ War” and became known as the “War of the Theatres.”

The problem came with the boy-actors. Both Marston and Dekker had written their satirical and cynical plays for the Children of St. Paul’s. The boys’ companies had a long history, and in the early years of the reign of Elizabeth they were the dominant force in the London theatre. The rise of the public playhouses had somewhat dimmed their lustre but, in this era of satire in the late 1590s, they had returned to popularity. They performed a large number of “railing plays,” and one contemporary condemned those “committing their bitternesse, and liberall invectives against all estates, to the mouthes of Children, supposing their juniority to be a priviledge for any rayling, be it never so violent.” 1The connection between boys and adult satire was an aspect of a larger tradition. It is in part the legacy of the boys’ dramas written by John Lyly a generation before, which deployed a setting of classical history and legend. Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster , among other plays of the Poets’ War, used similar classical settings. It is also likely that the connection of the boys’ companies with court and Church, as well as their status as private companies, rendered them relatively immune to the usual condemnations of the civic authorities and the Privy Council. The experience of watching children playing adult parts was in any case quite a different thing. They could, as it were, mock adults in a different key. To be a boy, and to play an adult passion, is to throw that passion in sharper perspective. The emotion, or obsession, is more purely defined. In a theatrical culture which encouraged unreality and artifice, the mimicry of the boy-players was thus doubly attractive.