Shakespeare

Various inferior plays have been ascribed to Shakespeare as juvenile work, written when he first became acquainted with the stage. Other, more mature, plays have been described as later versions of his apprentice work. Perhaps his first plays have simply disappeared, lost in the voracious maw of time and forgetfulness. Certain surviving plays bear traces of the young Shakespeare’s additions and interpolations. In his first years he may have worked as a reviser of botched or incomplete plays. He may simply have revived old plays by adding new colour. There may, in other words, be a great deal more Shakespeare than is currently included in scholarly editions. Did he collaborate with other dramatists? It is impossible to tell. In his early years he may not even have been particularly “Shakespearian.”

The supposition must be that he began to write long before he came to London – poetry, if not drama, came instinctively and easily to him. Given the large number of plays that have been ascribed to him, it is also fair to assume that he began writing drama soon after first joining the theatre as an actor. His earliest known plays are so expert in construction and so plausible in speech that it is hard to believe that they represent the first exercise of his pen, adept though that pen was. There are certain early plays that may be in part or in whole his work. There was an early version of Hamlet, and perhaps of Pericles. There are other plays which bear the unmistakable impress of Shakespeare’s imagination, Edmund Ironside and Edward the Third. They are well shaped and confident, with a steady mastery of the verse line and a fine ear for invective and declamation. They lack the Shakespearian timbre or tone, but even Shakespeare had to begin somewhere. And there are the strangest moments of recognition – of half-familiar cadences and half-shaped images – as if the shadow of Shakespeare had passed over the page. Textual analysis also suggests that The Troublesome Raigne of King John and Edmund Ironside were both written by the same person, a “young writer, glowing but dimly in the predawn darkness of Elizabethan drama, just before the morning stars sung together.”³ There is one other question that has never satisfactorily been laid to rest. Who else could have written them?

Their inclusion in any list of tentative Shakespearian titles is not surprising, since in many instances they represent the germ or seed from which his more recognisable plays emerge. Nor is it inconceivable that he revised his apprentice work at a later date. It is generally accepted that he continued to revise his plays all his life, keeping in mind the demands of performance and contemporaneity. The suggestion has been rejected by some editors and textual scholars, on the very good grounds that it would make their task of publishing a “definitive” edition of any play quite impossible. But there is every reason to believe that the plays currently available in print offer only a provisional version of the plays actually performed.

So we see Shakespeare attending the plays of John Lyly and George Peek as well as watching the first performances of Tamburlaine. He knew The Spanish Tragedy very well. He was all too aware of Marlowe’s brilliant success. Contemporary literature was also around him. The manuscript of the first three books of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was in London, and the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles had just been published. If he now felt impelled to write for the stage, all these sources and influences were at hand. We also have the alleged “early” plays by Shakespeare that, at a conservative estimate, account for three years of his writing. Indeed they all fall within the period 1587 to 1590. During this period, too, the pamphleteer Robert Greene mounted a number of attacks upon an unnamed dramatist, whom he considered to be both unlearned and a plagiarist of other men’s styles. Who was that particular dramatist?

CHAPTER 28 I See Sir, You Are Eaten Vp with Passion

Robert Greene himself” was one of the “university wits,” a friend to both Nashe and Marlowe, who like many of his Oxbridge contemporaries was obliged to earn his living by hack-work. He was very popular at the time – plays like The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and The History of Orlando Furioso were “box-office successes” for Philip Henslowe at the Rose Theatre. His pamphlets are still considered to be unrivalled accounts of the life of sixteenth-century London. But he was sensitive to slights and extremely envious of his talented contemporaries.