Shakespeare

So from a possible early version of Hamlet to Titus Andronicus we have some six or seven plays which might have been composed by the young Shakespeare in the first two years after his arrival in London – among them The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The Taming of a Shrew, Edmund Ironside and The Troublesome Raigne of King John. It has been objected in the past that he could not possibly have written so many plays in so short a space of time – at any reckoning, some three or four a year. But that is completely to misapprehend the conditions of the sixteenth-century theatre. He was not a modern dramatist. The wonder is that he did not write more. Indeed other plays, or parts of plays, have been ascribed to him. Plays were composed,performed and discarded at an astonishingly rapid rate – with seven or eight new plays performed by each of the companies in any one season. Contemporaries like Robert Greene produced them on demand, and were lucky if their works had a dramatic life of a month or a week. They were not considered to be literature in any sense. In addition Shakespeare wished to make his name, and fortune, in the theatre. Comparisons with his later rate of production are not appropriate. He wrote quickly, and furiously, filled with the first momentum of his genius.

There is a portrait of a young man known as the Grafton Portrait, from its ownership by the Duke of Grafton in the 1700s. In this picture the age of the sitter is given as twenty-four, and the date of composition is 1588. On the back has been written “W + S.” Its association with Shakespeare might be easily dismissed as wishful thinking, except that the young man bears a striking resemblance to the engraving of the older Shakespeare in the First Folio. The mouth and jaw are the same, as are the ridge of the nose and the almond-shaped eyes. The whole set of the expression is the same. This young man is dark-haired, slim and good-looking (in no way precluding the image of the somewhat stout and bald gentleman of later years); he is dressed in fashionable doublet and collar, but his expression is alert if also somewhat pensive. He is one who could, if necessary, take on the romantic lead. It has been suggested that the young Shakespeare, at the age of twenty-four in 1588, could not possibly have afforded such fashionable and expensive clothing. And how could he or his father have paid the portraitist? But if he were already a successful dramatist, what then? It is in any case a glorious supposition.

CHAPTER 31

Ile Neuer Pawse Againe,

Neuer Stand Still

So a picture emerges of the young dramatist, still in his mid-twenties but already achieving considerable popular success with a multifarious range of histories, comedies and melodramas. He turned his hand to anything with the expedition and confidence of one who seems able to give his words wings. He wrote; he collaborated with others. The qualities with which he was later associated, abundance and copiousness, were evident from the beginning. Yet he was also earning his living as an actor, a “hired man” who was already playing demanding roles. He had moved to Lord Strange’s Men by 1588, confirming Henslowe’s later note that the company owned a play entitled “harey the vi.” In the early months of 1589 they were travelling in the country. But there is a lacuna in the records, and it is impossible to trace the course of their theatrical journeys. They were back in London by the autumn of that year at the very latest, however, where they are recorded as playing at the Cross Keys Inn.

There had been some public controversy over certain farces referring to religious disputes of the time, and the Lord Mayor of London summoned the Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men to prohibit them from performing in the city. It was an indication of the constant tension between the civic authorities and the playing companies. A letter from the Lord Mayor, of 6 November, declared that the Admiral’s Men had obeyed the request but that Lord Strange’s Men “in very Contemptuous manner departing from me,went to the Crosse keys and played that afternoon, to the greate offence of the better sorte that knewe they were prohibited.” As a result “I coulde do no lesse but this evening Comitt some of them to one of the Compters.”¹ It is possible that Shakespeare was one of those consigned to prison.