Shakespeare

Shakespeare also changed the parts in order to complement the actors. He altered the characterisation of Jack Cade, for example, to incorporate the talents of Will Kempe, who had become the principal comic of his company; he added the detail that Cade is a wild morris-dancer, at which dance Kempe was known for his skills. In the revised version of the play, too, the stage-directions refer to “Sinklo,” “Sink.” and “Sin.”; this was not a character in the play but, rather, the name of the actor John Sinklo or Sincler, who was well known for his extreme slenderness. This suggests that Shakespeare was rewriting the part with Sincler fully in mind and eye.

These revisions and alterations were no doubt part of his practice with all of his drama. It is only through chance or fortune that copies of The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy, Edmund Ironside and The Taming of a Shrew, have survived. Shakespeare was also learning and changing his craft in another sense. His later historical dramas, in particular the two parts of Henry IV, display much more subtlety and inwardness both in their characterisation and in their action. The demonstrative and oratorical mode of the earliest plays is subdued in favour of Falstaff’s wit and the old king’s melancholy. It has even been suggested that Shakespeare’s histories led him directly towards his experiments with tragedy and that one form cannot really be separated from the other. Certainly Shakespeare himself does not seem to have distinguished between them. The cry of “Et tu, Brute” in the drama appropriately entitled The True Tragedy points in that direction; the English history plays lead to Julius Caesar, which in turn proceeds towards Hamlet.

Part IV. The Earl of Pembroke’s Men

Robert Greene’s autobiographical pamphlet, Groats-Worth of Witte, calls Shakespeare “an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you.”

CHAPTER 32 Among the Buzzing pleased Multitude

Shakespeare followed public taste but he also helped to create it. He wrote ten plays devoted to the subject of English history, far more than any of his contemporaries, and we can infer that it was for him an agreeable and accommodating subject. But, as is often the case with literary genius, the imagination of the age helped to inspire him. This in a sense was the first period of secular history in England. The plays of an earlier date presented sacred history from Creation to Doom, but from the mid-sixteenth century onwards the twin forces of the Reformation and Renaissance learning persuaded scholars and writers to look beyond the eschatology of the Church. If human will rather than divine providence was the source of significant event, then drama had found a new subject. It could be said that Shakespeare was present at the invention of human motive and human purpose in English history.

Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York had been published in 1548, and the first edition of Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland followed in 1577. These were the books that Shakespeare devoured, although he seemed to favour Holinshed’s more popular account of the past. If we wish to see Shakespeare as a characteristically or even quintessentially English writer, this appetite for historical re-creation affords some evidence for that identification. Schelling described the history play as a distinctively English genre. It did not last for ever, of course, but faded after approximately twenty years of successful performance; coincidentally or not, history plays really only lasted while Shakespeare continued to write them.