Shakespeare

As the Church became desacralised, its candles and its images removed, so urban society became more profoundly ritualistic and spectacular. This is of the utmost importance for any understanding of Shakespeare’s genius. He thrived in a city where dramatic spectacle became the primary means of understanding reality. The pulpit just outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, known as Paul’s Cross, was defined as “the very stage of this land”² where the preacher played his part, and John Donne declared that “this City is a great Theatre.” An early dramatist, Edward Sharpham, echoed this sentiment with his observation that “the Cittie is a Commedie, both in partes and in apparel, and your Gallants are the Actors.”³ Just as in more recent times New York has become a cinematic city, known primarily through the images in film and television, so London was the first theatrical city. The success of the drama in London, whether presented at the Globe or at the Curtain, had no parallel in any other European capital. From the production in 1581 of Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, there were innumerable plays that used the city as their setting.

The London playhouse was a new kind of building, erected for the first time in this period. People watched the actors in order to learn how to behave, how to speak and how to bow; the audience applauded individual speeches. The drama was also used as a means of conveying a social or political message to those assembled. A preacher complained that “plays are grown nowadays into such high request, as that some profane persons affirm they can learn as much both for edifying and example at a play, as at a sermon.”⁴ For the majority of the English, the drama of the mystery plays and the morality plays had until recent times been the major vehicle for spiritual instruction and doctrinal fable. It still retained its authority as an instructor. It was not simply an entertainment in the modern sense.

There was a profound recognition of life as a play. Jaques’s metaphor, “All the world’s a stage …” in As You Like It, was already a Renaissance commonplace. In sixteenth-century London, however, the truism acquired a more powerful resonance. For some the conflation of life and theatre was a source of comedy and high spirits; for others, like the Duchess of Malfi in Webster’s melodrama, it provoked sadness rather than mirth. Whatever its precise connotation, it consorted with what may be called the London vision. This has a direct bearing on Shakespeare’s drama. If life was a play, then what was a play but heightened life? The action on stage might be artificial, and might even draw attention to its artificiality, but it was still deeply authentic.

What were the characteristics of this London vision? It combined mockery and satire, discontinuity and change. It included cruelty and spectacle, where bears were tied to the stake and baited until death. It was mixed and variable, conflating satire and tragedy, melodrama and burlesque. It was the context for what Voltaire described as “les farces monstrueuses” of Shakespeare. It often depended upon coincidence and chance encounter. It was interested in the behaviour of crowds. It was bright and garish. It jostled for attention: Walt Whitman believed that Shakespeare “painted too intensely.” It was also implicitly egalitarian. Once the actors had taken off the robes of king or common soldier, all were equal. On the stage itself the queen shared the same space – had the same presence – as the clown. As Hazlitt said at a later date, “it raises the great, the remote, and the possible to an equality with the real, the little and the near.” This was Shakespeare’s experience of the city.

CHAPTER 22 There’s Many a Beast Then in a Populous City

Visitors to London registered their surprise or disapproval at the level of intimacy between the sexes. Erasmus mentions that “wherever you come, you are received with a kiss by all; when you take your leave, you are dismissed with kisses.”¹ It was customary, at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, for women to wear dresses in public that exposed their breasts.