Shakespeare

It has also been argued that the mimi and histriones of medieval provenance continued their work well into Shakespeare’s own period. The mimus put on an ass’s head, as did Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; he worked with a dog, as did Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Thus Shakespeare, and other sixteenth-century dramatists, emerged from many hundreds of years of cultural practice. What could be more natural – inevitable, almost – than continuity rather than abrupt or unanticipated change? Life is a process rather than a hurdle race. It is wrong to assume that somehow the English drama began with the emergence of Shakespeare. He entered what was already a swiftly flowing stream.

CHAPTER 26 This Keene Incounter of Our Wits

Shakespeare arrived in the city at the most opportune possible moment, when the drama of Peele and Lyly had become highly fashionable and the new drama of Kyd and Marlowe was just emerging. By the late 1580s and early 1590s the theatrical companies were performing six days a week with a different play each day. The Admiral’s Company launched twenty-one new plays in one season, and performed thirty-eight plays in all. The Queen’s Men were performing on different occasions and in different seasons at the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, the Belsavage on Ludgate Hill, the Theatre and the Curtain. Lord Strange’s Men were at the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, the Theatre and then the Rose. There was much movement and change in the theatrical world. The Queen’s Men lost their position of primacy in 1588, as we have observed, and were supplanted by the combined talents of the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men. This may have been the moment when Shakespeare himself joined Strange’s company.

There were, in addition, such groups as the Earl of Warwick’s Men, the Earl of Essex’s Men and the Earl of Sussex’s Men; they made extended tours of the country, but of course they also performed in London. Gabriel Harvey, a close companion of Edmund Spenser, wrote to Spenser of “freshe starteupp comedanties” with “sum newe devised interlude, or sum malt-conceivid comedye fitt for the Theater or sum other paintid stage whereat thou and thy lively copesmates in London maye lawghe ther mouthes and bellyes full for a pence or twoepence apiece.”¹ We may assume that all the possible venues for theatrical performance were fully booked, by the companies then being formed or consolidated, and that Shakespeare had stepped into an environment where his talents could be fully exploited.

The principal theatrical companies themselves were significantly larger than they were at a later date, but this may in part have been the result of loose associations and amalgamations. The number of players in each company, men and boys, rose from an average of seven or eight to more than twenty. A play like Peek’s The Battle of Alcazar demanded a stage company of some twenty-six players. As a result of larger companies, too, there was more ingenuity in staging, with rapid scene-changing and more spectacular effects. The playwrights themselves grew more ambitious, and began working on a larger scale; by some strange natural process, too, the plays themselves grew longer. All of these forces helped to create a truly popular drama, of which Shakespeare was the principal beneficiary. It was a small world, comprising no more than two or three hundred people at most, but it had a disproportionately large effect upon the London public. It was the most urgent and the most popular form of artistic expression, and in that sense helped to create the new atmosphere of urban life.