Anna Beer - The Life of the Author - William Shakespeare

In retrospect, we can see that William Shakespeare was in the right place, at the right time: London 1592. Whether his family, particularly his father, saw the situation in the same way is another question. Fred Tromly (2010, p. 251) speculates on John Shakespeare’s response to his son’s career choice, bearing in mind that no one knew just how lucrative the theater industry would be for his son. Believing that John saw William “rejecting the traditional forms of business in favour of an enterprise that, in addition to being morally questionable in the eyes of many, offered very little promise of stability and steady income,” he sees an unbridgeable generation gap opening between father and son. For Jonathan Bate that rejection of artisan business in Stratford was less calculated but no less significant. Refusing to speculate about the Shakespeare family’s Catholicism, Bate nevertheless asserts that “the balance of probability is that William Shakespeare’s own instinct and inheritance were cautious, traditional, respectable, suspicious of change. We may as well say conservative” (2008, p. 66). This all changed when William “got the acting bug.” For Bate, as with Tromly, John Shakespeare would not have been best pleased. Coming from a class where “idleness” was sin, he “would have subscribed to the common view that actors were little better than vagabonds […] When John heard that his son had become employed in the theatre, he would have been flabbergasted. The dramatic profession was a completely unknown quantity” (2008, pp. 73–74).

What no one could have imagined was William Shakespeare’s unlikely and swift rise from actor to jointsharer in a new acting company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. But that is where he was headed.

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