Shakespeare

The luxury of choice was not given to another contemporary dramatist, George Peele, of whom there is a memorable image in a small volume entitled The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele. He is described in this catchpenny pamphlet as lodging with his wife and family in Southwark beside the playhouses; here he is to be seen wrapped in a blanket, writing furiously, while his wife and young daughter cook larks for supper. He is also described as “of the poeticall disposition, never to write so long as his mony lasted.” The real and historical Peele became acquainted with Shakespeare soon after Shakespeare’s arrival in London. Peele had a measure of success with drama, but he was equally well known to his contemporaries as an inventor of street pageants and other public shows. That is why his plays were notable for their ceremonial and ritual aspects, and for the expressive clarity of their language. He also catered to the popular taste in blood and gore, in murder and madness. One of his stage directions records the entry of “Death and three Furies, one with blood, one with Dead mens heads in dishes, another with Dead mens bones.” Shakespeare is widely credited for having taken over the first act of Titus Andronicus from Peele and completing the play, while elaborating upon the older writer’s sensationalistic effects. This was the theatrical world that Shakespeare inherited.

Shakespeare was later to parody Peek’s bombast in his history plays, and there may have been some cause for disagreement between the two men. Peele, the son of a London charity school clerk, was proud of his education at Oxford and his status as Master of Arts. Yet it was difficult for even a university-educated dramatist to make his way in the capital; there were too many clerkly writers and too many claimants to noble purses. There is every reason to suppose that young writers were attracted to London because of the rise of the playhouses there, but expectations of plenty are not always rewarded. So Peele tried his hand at various kinds of verse and drama – translations, university plays, pastorals, patriotic shows, biblical plays and comedies. Like literary young men of any and every period, he had to make money whatever way he could; he could have come out of George Gissing’s New Grub Street rather than a sixteenth-century chapbook.

Like literary young men in London, too, he and his contemporaries tended to congregate together. In his lifetime Peele was associated with Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene – all of them “university wits,” spirited, reckless, drunken, promiscuous, wild, and in the case of Marlowe dangerous. As Nashe said of his erstwhile companions, “wee scoffe and are iocund, when the sword is ready to goe through us; on our wine-benches we bid a Fico for tenne thousand plagues.”³ They were the roaring boys of the 1580s and 1590s, doomed to early deaths from drink or the pox. It would be mistaken to view them as some coterie, but they were part of the same literary (and social) tendency. Shakespeare knew them well enough, but there is no evidence that he consorted with them. He had too great a respect for his own genius, and thus a much greater sense of self-preservation. He was too sane to destroy himself – or, rather, he had a much greater need for permanence and stability. It is not known how Peele reacted to a collaboration with this apparently uneducated young actor from the country, but it provoked fury and resentment in at least one of his university colleagues.

So the stage was always ready for new voices. Even as Lyly was being performed at court and in the undercroft of St. Paul’s Cathedral, there were new dramas and new dramatists coming into the ascendant. Shakespeare entered London at a moment of dramatic revelation. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy had caused something of a sensation, and it was swiftly followed by Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. The Spanish Tragedy inaugurated the fashion for revenge tragedy on the London stage; it directly inspired a very early version of Hamlet, which there is some reason to suppose was written by the young Shakespeare. The Spanish Tragedy has many parallels with the more famous play. It has a ghost; it has a variety of murders; it has scenes of madness, real and feigned; it stages a play within a play that promotes revenge; it has a great deal of blood. Unlike the later version of Hamlet, however, it is suffused by an unvarying rhetoric of vengeance and retribution that thrilled its first auditors. It was an immensely powerful and seductive language filled with sensationalist imagery. It became a form of secular liturgy. When Hieronimo advances upon the stage, in a state of undress, he calls out (II, v, 1-2):

What outcries pluck me from my naked bed,

And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear?