Shakespeare

It is perhaps odd to consider Shakespeare as a royal servant, following in procession on ceremonial occasions, but there is no reason to believe that he questioned the privilege. It was, in a real sense, the height of his social accomplishment. Gone were the days when players were classified with strolling vagrants, and were often turned back by the aldermen of various towns. Gone, too, were the days when the actors were merely tolerated rather than welcomed in the capital. The new king, very early in his reign, had bestowed his favours upon them. Before the reign of James, the Globe players had been called upon to perform at court on approximately three occasions each year; in the first ten years of his reign they were asked to play fourteen times each year. So the court was a source of profit, as well as patronage, to the King’s Men.

There were of course those of a jealous disposition. A play by Francis Beaumont on the subject of social climbing, The Woman Hater, struck a glancing blow at Shakespeare’s elevation with the remark that “another payre you shall see, that were heire apparent legges to a Glover, these legges hope shortly to bee honourable.” Shakespeare’s modest origins were by now well known.

It is significant that William Shakespeare and Laurence Fletcher were first mentioned in the letters patent. Fletcher, hitherto never mentioned as one of the Globe players, had in fact been leader of a group of Scottish actors who had in previous years been patronised and welcomed by James when he was James VI of Scotland; he had even protected them against the depredations of the Kirk. Fletcher had been known as “comedyan to his majestic” So he travelled south with the new English monarch and, as the sovereign’s true servant, had been placed with the new company of the King’s Men. The fact that he is named before Shakespeare in the letters patent suggests, however, that by common consent Shakespeare was the leader or principal man of the Globe players.

Many of Shakespeare’s earlier plays were now revived for royal performance. The King’s Men put on new productions of The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry V and The Merchant of Venice. If James had not previously been acquainted with the work of Shakespeare, the oversight was now remedied. He seems particularly to have enjoyed The Merchant of Venice; he asked for it to be performed again, perhaps because the legal scene between Portia and Shylock satisfied his own taste for disputation. But it is more significant that all of Shakespeare’s new plays – those written after 1603, in other words – were performed at least once before the king. Some of them were performed several times. The records of payment demonstrate that, whenever the King’s Men performed at court, the king himself watched the proceedings.

The presence of the new monarch, then, had an effect upon the dramatist’s art. It could hardly be otherwise. The London theatre always had to look towards the sources of power and of patronage. The monarch was the lord of the spectacle. So it is no real cause of wonder to discover that, after the accession of James, Shakespeare was ready to shape certain of his plays to reveal the figure of the king somewhere in the design. This is the case with Macbeth and, to a certain extent, with Measure for Measure. The plays reflect, for example, James’s well-known fear of witchcraft – especially the form of magic aimed against a ruling sovereign. They reflect his fear of crowds, and his habitual dislike of Puritans. The ruling family’s great liking for masques also affects the staging of tableaux and dumb-shows in Shakespeare’s last plays, where music and dance play a large part in the concluding action.

But the King’s Men could not stay in London to enjoy their privileged position. The plague had returned to the city. John Stow later estimated that, out of a population of approximately two hundred thousand, some thirty-eight thousand died. After this date, the references to plague in Shakespeare’s plays take on a much darker hue than hitherto; there are references to death tokens and to plague sores. It was not some local difficulty but a pressing and ominous reality; at a conservative estimate some seven years of Shakespeare’s career were affected by what was known as “the death.” Contemporary Londoners believed that the plague came from planetary influences, blasting the air with fever. Yet of course, though Londoners did not know it, the rats and their fleas had come back.