Shakespeare: A Life (20 page)

cate -- so it is -- but he brought to comedy a sense of form and a
clarity new in England. He had his characters discuss the state of
being in love for the first time on a London stage; and by combining
various genres and modes -- such as farce, bawdry, mythology, romance,
political allegory -- he gave drama a presiding, supple intelligence,
a sense of its unlimited possibilities. Drawing on Ovid and Plutarch
and emphasizing a beauty of style, his works suggested more dramatic
possibilities to Shakespeare than those of any other comic playwright.

Still others improved on Lyly by combining new elements, and by
writing parts for characters rather than classical types. Robert Greene,
down from Cambridge, red-haired, self-indulgent, with a mistress,
had discipline as a writer. His prose romances are often excellent; his
style tends to be supple, copious, and incisive. His comedy
The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
(printed in 1594 and perhaps acted in 1587) duplicates a romantic triangle in Lyly
Campaspe
and foreshadows one in Shakespeare
Two Gentlemen
:
wonderfully yielding to love's force, a lover relinquishes his lady to
one who loves her more. Greene interlaces magic, kingship, pastoral
effects, and love-rivalry with pathos, humour, and a quick pace. His
women, here and elsewhere, are Patient Griseldas, though they seem
lifelike in their narrow roles. George Peele, meanwhile, with a
background in writing festive pageantry, was carrying out structural
experiments. No Elizabethan play of comparable length has a more
complex plot, for example, than his
Old Wives Tale
with its folklore elements and 'framing' devices
³⁴
-- in which some of its characters watch and comment on the unfolding stage-action.

The University Wits were excelling themselves, borrowing from each
other with jealous eyes, lifting the drama to new heights, and
pleasing the companies, when a grammar-school trained man -- a mere
actor -- began to rival them. Shakespeare, it seems, had decided to
write for his fellow players.

He may not have done so without encouragement. Certainly he appears
to have been a busy, obliging hireling; Greene would accuse

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him later of being a ' Johannes fac totum', a jack of all trades in the
theatre, or a would-be universal genius. To be sure, Greene does not
use ' factotum' in its modern sense to signify a man who simply does
odd jobs, 'a man of all work', but, rather, to suggest the high conceit
of a man who both acts in and writes plays. Shakespeare's repertory
acting itself called for dexterity and boldness; he can hardly have
concealed from the players his wit or sense of rhetoric, and he seems to
have impressed one actor -- Beeston -- as a person well trained
enough to have taught at school. If his fellows did ask Shakespeare to
write a play, they must have felt they had little to lose.

A knack for dashing off a script was highly valued, but not well
rewarded in practice: companies paid about £6 or a play, which had a
normal run of eight to twelve performances over about five months. (By
the eighth performance, as Roslyn Knutson calculates, the company might
expect to recover its production costs and make a profit.
³⁵
) Popular works were often revived, as Kyd's and Marlowe's plays were
over the years -- but there were costly failures. To speed up their
writing, most playwrights preferred to collaborate. For example among
eighty-nine scripts that Henslowe of the Rose tells us about in detail,
fifty-five are jointly written, and only thirty-four are single-author
plays.
³⁶
In a small collaborative team, a writer might specialize in working up a few kinds of action, scene, or situation.

An actor who could write a good play by himself was a rarity, but in
Elizabeth's time he would not have seemed 'literary' or set apart. It is
clear enough that Shakespeare coveted the normalcy of being a group
member, just as his father for years, and at cost to himself, had
served with his aldermanic brethren at Stratford. The group offered
consoling protections. A measure of anonymity, a guise of
ordinariness, in time suited Shakespeare well -- and he and his
fellows would have thought of a play as a collective event. A script
existed, above all, for performance, when it became a play-in-being.
Indeed, their acceptance of the notion of a play as a group activity
-- not as words on a page -- was one of the actors' most valuable
legacies from the medieval theatre.

A
play's performance was its virtual publication, although the
dramatist Beaumont later praised what he called a 'second publication'
³⁷
when a work appeared in print. Shakespeare may have author-

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ized the publication of several of his plays after they had come out in
inaccurate quartos. A play issued in 'quarto' was a thin, unbound
object advertised by its title-page, whereas a 'folio' was a large,
expensive volume -- not used for collections of plays until Jonson
Works
in 1616. Dramas were only an insignificant part of the book trade,
and bookshops such as those in St Paul's churchyard, which were not
mere 'stalls', but structures two and four storeys high, hardly
bothered with them. Peter Blayney reckons that on average only five or
six new plays a year were printed in Shakespeare's time. The notion
that a printed drama was often stolen by a rival company is quite
mistaken. The troupes, as a rule, did not poach from each other's
repertories, and more co-operation existed between acting companies
than is usually recognized. But the book trade could be flooded with
even a few playbooks. Shakespeare's three most popular plays in
quarto,
I Henry IV
,
Richard III
, and
Richard II
, possibly advertised his company, but sales in the shops would have brought him no direct return.
³⁸
About half of his plays were printed in quarto before the large Folio
with thirty-six of his works was published in 1623, seven years after
he died. Throughout his life, he had little to gain from seeing his
name in a London bookshop.

Yet this
is not to say that he cared little for play-texts. Far from being a
spontaneous genius, pouring out work with no heed for it, he evidently
took pains with scripts; he was a reviser, with a poet's concern for
verbal style. He usually read omnivorously to make a play; he relied
on his memory of sources, if not also on working notes in a 'table
book', selected materials to transform, and produced an acting text
about which he often had second thoughts. He undertook some very
substantial revisions. Initially, a text might require only minor
changes for production. In giving a script to his fellows, he might,
however, leave a few major decisions unresolved to benefit from advice
during staging.
³⁹
Although he left minor discrepancies in his works, he must have
improved his early plays as his experience increased, and, no doubt,
repertory playing aided him more than it harmed him. As an
actor-playwright, he gained an insider's awareness of stage effects, a
feeling for tactics that would make a character's psychology at once
distinctive and plausible, and, above all, a splendid sense of overall
design and economy of effect.

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We may lack his earliest piece. But if Lyly began with a drama as fine as
Campaspe
, Shakespeare may have begun with
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
,
which has the simplest design of his seventeen comedies. The
composition dates of his early plays still provide a misty battleground
for scholars, and the text of this play may have been changed over
four or five years. One version of
Two Gentlemen
could have
been written around 1588-91, when its elegant Lylyan theme of 'love
versus friendship'was being mocked in romances and plays alike. For
example, after two genteel friends in Peele
Old Wives Tale
agree to share gains, Jack thinks nothing of asking Eumenides for half
of a lady. Happily, Delia is ready to be cut in two, since she
honours the cult of male friendship:

EUMENIDES. Before I will falsify my faith unto my friend, I will divide
her. Jack, thou shalt have half . . . Therefore prepare thyself,
Delia, for thou must die.

DELLA. Then farewell, world! Adieu, Eumenides!
⁴⁰

But Peele's joke destroys a pretended reality. His scene is funny but
it becomes slapstick; an audience will not believe Delia
might
be sliced. In contrast, Shakespeare mocks and believes in his story at once; in
Two Gentlemen
,
he distances an action while arousing our 812concern for his
characters, and shows that he can write farce and comedy simultaneously.
He fails the more egregiously, now and then perhaps, when his effects,
which are new, go awry. His story, in outline, is so simple I will
risk telling it briefly. Proteus and Valentine, the two young
gentlemen, lose their gentility, but recover it at last to wed Julia
and Silvia. Leaving Julia, Proteus runs after his friend Valentine to
Milan, falls in love with the friend's amour Silvia, and then
treacherously gets Silvia's father the Duke to banish Valentine. Missing
her Proteus, Julia disguises herself as a page to journey to Milan,
where she enters Proteus's service. With new falseness, Proteus
pretends to win Silvia for Sir Thurio, while trying to make love to
her. Valentine -chosen by outlaws as their king, because he is handsome
and a linguist -- eventually confronts Proteus, who is about to rape
Silvia. Moved by his friend's total repentance, Valentine renounces
his own loving claim to Silvia -- or, as he tells Proteus, in lines
that can still mortify the play's critics:

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By penitence th' Eternal's wrath's appeased. And that my love may
appear plain and free, All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.

(V. iv. 81-3)

That ludicrous gesture, at least, signals to us that the friends are at
last resuming the habits of gentility they left behind in Act I.
After the 'page' swoons and reveals herself to be Julia, Proteus
recalls his love for her. Valentine, with the Duke's consent, prepares
to marry Silvia, and two happy couples will return to Milan for a
double wedding and bliss ever after.

Technically -- as Stanley Wells has ably shown -- the young
playwright's handling of this story has drawbacks. Unwilling or unable
to orchestrate group scenes, Shakespeare relies on soliloquies,
duologues, and asides throughout; in one bad mishmash, two soliloquies
come together.
⁴¹
Some of the poetry (as in the lovely song 'Who is Silvia?') has an
April-like freshness, but some of it is shallow, humdrum padding, and a
few speeches might be spoken by disembodied voices. The outlaws, even
as parodies, are feeble; they might be children trying to imagine what
adults would say. Thurio and the Duke are pasteboard; Valentine is
almost brainless, though affecting. Speed the page seems like a pert,
saucy Lylyan page, and the play echoes sententious remarks on women
and love in Lyly
Sapho and Phao
.

But if it is close in temper to Lyly's world,
Two Gentlemen
is not quite Lylyan, and grammar-school training in
imitatio
has served the young playwright well. Borrowing and assimilating
widely, as if he could hardly trust what he knows of life, Shakespeare
is an accomplished parasite. He lifts part of the story from a Queen's
players' drama known as 'felix & philiomena', of 1585, or from
Nicolas Collin's French translation of Jorge de Montemayor's
Portuguese story
Diana Enamorada
, upon which 'felix' is probably based. He apparently looks into Puttenham
English Poesie
treatise, works up an incident from Ovid, and takes numerous details from Arthur Brooke's romantic poem
Romeus and Juliet
( 1562).

But, extensive as it is, his deft borrowing is already more nearly a
habit of mind -- or habit of being -- than an artistic necessity.

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Shakespeare did not always depend on literary models or existing sources, and much of
Two Gentlemen
springs from invention. Images, devices, or plots he takes up he
usually changes. He had learned to 'vary' from literary sources at
school when he was hearing simple sentimental exhortations to bold
action: 'Lyfte up thy heart', says Palingenius in the English
translation of a school text, 'and walke the depth apace.' To make
good use of a source was to 'walke the depth', or boldly to further
one's new, appropriate enterprise. Borrowing from literary models
helped one to escape from the vices of singularity and useless
invention. Furthermore, despite the ambiguous evidence of the Sonnets,
Shakespeare seems to have flourished with a certain annihilation of the
sense of himself and a profoundly sympathetic absorption in other,
imagined viewpoints. His conception of his fellow actors' preferences
and abilities on stage -- and his awareness of viewpoints implicit in
his sources -- must often have helped him to write more freely.

If he wrote
Two Gentlemen
before 1592, the play was modish. Its clown Lance -- and Lance's dog
Crab -- would have been theatrically advanced at any time in the
1590s; for though there had been clowns before, the actor playing
Lance -- and the real dog on stage, who 'acts' what he is -- keep up a
fictive illusion but also break it, with new, uneasy, yet intense
comic effects. Into an elegant, artificial world, Lance brings his
earthy peasant realism, as when he takes the blame for what Crab did
under the Duke's table in a 'pissing-while.' (IV. iv. 19). He barely
advances the plot, but by berating his dog as unfeeling he highlights
Proteus's stony behaviour with Julia -- and offsets the alltoo-genteel
silliness of Valentine.

Julia is so
affecting that she nearly destroys an artful, fragile balance. The
author invests her with religious imagery before causing her to
suffer. He gives to both Julia and Silvia an inner strength denied his
men, as if he were recalling the two pious women in his father's home
at Henley Street. It is most unlikely that Julia is, in any sense, a
portrait of Anne Shakespeare; but the playwright has learned from his
women. He so expertly evokes Julia's feelings that she becomes more
moving than is necessary for his play. Most of all, he reveals himself
as an unemphatic and astute writer producing a script stronger than
the

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