Shakespeare

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.”⁴ A moralist, William Prynne, stated that “this is one of the first things they learne as soone as they are admitted, to see Stage-playes.”⁵ One 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”⁶ to 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.

It is important to understand this connection, if only to bring life to Shakespeare’s use of law and of legal terms in his plays and in his poetry. A drama like The Merchant of Venice can be properly understood only in this context, with the civil law of Portia pitted against the common law of Shy-lock. It is one of the defining structures of Shakespeare’s imagination.

CHAPTER 43 See, See, They Ioyne, Embrace, and Seeme to Kisse

The new company had the benefit of new, or almost new, plays. It is clear enough that Shakespeare revised The Comedy of Errors, and it is likely that he “improved” the other plays he had already written. But it is also worth noting the new vein of romantic drama that Shakespeare began at this time, the principal plays of this period being Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The precise order cannot now be ascertained and, in any case, it is not of much consequence. The general tendency of his art is of much more significance. The hard edges of the early Italianate comedies, and the ornate rhetoric of the first history plays, now give way to extended lyricism and to more tender or perhaps just more complex characters. He was assured of a range of actors who could convey every mood and every sentiment. He was now the single most important dramatic poet of the period, and he had the incalculable advantage of a stable group of actors for whom to write.

We may plausibly imagine the cast list of Romeo and Juliet. We know that Will Kempe played Peter, the bawdy servant of the Capulets, and that Richard Burbage played the leading role of Romeo. One of the boys played Juliet, and another boy – or perhaps an older actor – played the garrulous Nurse. It is generally assumed that Shakespeare played the part of the Friar and the Chorus, as we have seen, but Dryden, in “Defence of the Epilogue”to The Conquest of Granada (1670), says that “Shakespeare showed the best of his skill in Mercutio, and he said himself that he was forced to kill him in the third Act, to prevent being killed by him.” Mercutio is the bawdy, gallant, quicksilver friend of Romeo whose speech on the activities of Queen Mab is one of the most eloquent and fanciful in all of Shakespeare; his is the soaring spirit, buoyant and fantastical, unfettered by ideals and delusions, which Shakespeare had to kill in order to make way for the romantic tragedy of the play’s conclusion. Such a free spirit does not consort well with a tale of love’s woe. There is melancholy as well as bawdry in Mercutio’s speeches, and it becomes clear that much of that melancholy springs from sexual disgust. Dry-den believed that this voice was closest to that of the dramatist himself, who could not delineate a tragedy without introducing farcical elements and who evinces all the manifestations of the same disgust. Mercutio has been described by some critics as heartless, even cold, but then so has been Shakespeare. That is perhaps why even in the midst of this lamentable tragedy there is more than a trace of commedia dell’arte; it has even been surmised that there were certain scenes staged in dumb-show.

The mood and imagery of the play is that of summer lightning, flashing across the sky (892-3):

Too like the lightning which doth cease to bee

Ere one can say, it lightens, sweete goodnight…