Shakespeare

In the course of his life Shakespeare came to know this city very well. He resided at various times in Bishopsgate, in Shoreditch, in Southwark and in Blackfriars. Well known to his neighbours and fellow parishioners, and recognisable by sight to the citizens who crowded the public theatres, he was in no sense an anonymous person. He knew the bookshops of St. Paul’s Churchyard and Paternoster Row; the title pages of his plays published in quarto list some sixteen different premises, from the sign of the Fox near St. Austin’s Gate to the sign of the White Hart in Fleet Street. He knew the taverns, where Rhenish and Gascony wines were sold, and the inns where beers and ales were purveyed. He knew the eating houses, or banqueting houses, such as the Oliphant in Southwark and Marco Lucchese’s in Hart Street. He knew the Royal Exchange, where free concerts were held on Sunday afternoons in the summer. He knew the fields to the north of the walls, where wrestling and archery contests were held. He knew the woods that encircled the city and, when in his plays he arranged meetings in the woods outside the town, the majority of his audience would have thought of London’s retreats. He also became very well acquainted with the Thames in all of its moods. He crossed it continually, and it became his primary form of transport. It was shallower, and wider, than it is now. But in the stillness of the night it could distinctly be heard, rushing between its banks. “Tut, man, I mean thou’lt loose the flood, and in loosing the flood, loose thy voyage.” So speaks Panthino in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (607-8). Shakespeare did not need to address London directly in his work; it is the rough cradle of all his drama.

CHAPTER 23 Sir I Shall Study Deserving

In his first arrival in London, how did he appear to his contemporaries? When in The Taming of the Shrew Lucentio leaves Pisa to “plunge” into Padua, that “nurserie of Arts,” he arrives expectantly and “with sacietie seekes to quench his thirst” (298). The young Shakespeare was eager for experience, in all of its forms; in some way he wished for “satiety” in the manifold life of London. In his fancy, or fantasy, he might “heare sweet discourse, conuerse with Noble-men” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 318). His aspiring spirit might there find its true setting. He also wished to test himself in the forcing house of thought and drama. This youthful ambition emerges in the most surprising contexts. In Antony and Cleopatra (2120-1) Antony remarks of the morning that it resembles:

… the spirit of a youth

That meanes to be of note.

Was he then eager for the fame that, as the King of Navarre puts it, “all hunt after in their lyues” (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1)? Many have assumed it, but the fame of an actor or a dramatist was in this period a highly perishable commodity. He would have felt the mental power of the city, however, and with it an inkling of his own destiny.

We might remark upon Shakespeare’s intense and overwhelming energy. It manifests itself at all stages of his career, and in his youth it must have been irrepressible. We might also remark upon his buoyancy, an inward easiness of spirit. As an actor he was trained to be quick and nimble, but that vitality was an essential part of his being; the images of his plays are filled with flight and with swift action, with movement and lightness. He is the poet of speed and agility. His characters are not of the study or the library but of the busy and active world. His is a drama of the sudden moment or change, and one of his most powerful images is that of the lightning strike “which doth cease to bee / Ere one can say, it lightens” (Romeo and Juliet, 892-3). All the myriad imagery, from the social as well as the natural world, suggests that he was a man of preternatural alertness. And he was known, like the characters within his comedies, for the quickness of his repartee. John Aubrey, acquiring his information from the theatrical Beeston family, noted that Shakespeare possessed “a very readie and pleasant smooth Witt” and also scribbled down that “he was a handsome well-shap’t man.”¹ Actors, with the exception of those who specialised in comic roles, were expected to be handsome and well shaped.

No remarkable young man or woman is devoid of energy, but many are also beset by self-consciousness and embarrassment. It is the price of eminence. There are many passing references in Shakespeare’s drama to blushes and to flushed faces, when emotions suffuse the countenance in unanticipated ways; it is an almost unwitting habit of Shakespeare to include such details. Charles Lamb mentions his “self-watchfulness.” There are also references in his dramas to stage-fright.