Shakespeare

Shakespeare and his companions travelled in a wagon, the players packed in with the baskets containing the costumes and with the essential stage properties. One of the actors of Pembroke’s Men, mortally ill in that summer, was obliged to sell his share of “apparell newe boughte.”¹ They might manage, at best, approximately thirty miles per day. It was an uncomfortable and overcrowded mode of travelling, but the alternative was to walk. One of the stage directions in The Taming of a Shrew is “Enter two of the players with packs at their backs, and a boy.” It is possible that some players took their horses with them, but the cost of upkeep on an extended tour was very high. They lodged at inns for the night, and played there for the price of their beds and suppers. This manner of life, difficult and uncertain in many respects, did have the virtue of encouraging a sense of fraternity among the actors. They were an extended family. It may even have become, for Shakespeare, a welcome substitute for his existing one.

They took with them trumpets and drums, to announce their arrival in every new town. They had to present the burgesses with a paper authorising them to perform, and a letter or some authority from the Earl of Pembroke to prove that they were not sturdy beggars to be whipped out of town. The mayor or chief magistrate then asked them to perform before a selected audience, for which a reward would generally be given. Only then were they granted permission to play in the inn-yards or in the guildhall. There were purpose-built playhouses, however, in larger places such as Bristol and York.

So Shakespeare came to know Ipswich and Coventry, Norwich and Gloucester, in the course of approximately twenty years of intermittent travelling “on the road.” The company with which he was associated for most of his career, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, travelled extensively in East Anglia and Kent but they also journeyed to Carlisle and Newcastle upon Tyne, Plymouth and Exeter, Winchester and Southampton. They visited altogether some eighty towns and thirty noble households, even making the journey up to Edinburgh. This was an important aspect of Shakespeare’s experience of the world. In the summer and autumn of 1592 it may have been the only viable means of earning a living.

But Pembroke’s Men were not simply a group of travelling players. They were invited to perform before the queen during this Christmas season, a signal honour for a company so recently established. They attained this degree of recognition in part because of the acting of Richard Burbage; but their success may have also been connected with the plays which they performed. Among these, as we have seen, were The Taming of a Shrew, Titus Andronicus and the two plays on the reign of Henry VI. We may now conclude that Shakespeare had achieved some renown on his own part, perhaps among his fellows rather than the spectators who flocked to see the plays, not least because he was bitterly attacked in this year by Robert Greene.

In the autumn of 1592 Greene’s autobiographical pamphlet, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million, of Repentance, condemned “that only Shake-scene in a countrey” who “supposes he is able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.” This suggests an element of rivalry and competitiveness in Shakespeare’s nature. The “best of you” refers to the university playwrights, among them Marlowe, Nashe and Greene himself. It was, in other words, a continuation of that war of words which Nashe and Greene had begun three years before.

Greene describes his rival as one of “those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours.” He is saying that Shake-scene was a player – moreover a player who had acted in the dramas of Greene and his contemporaries – and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. Because the young Shakespeare was one of the few who attained the dual role of actor and playwright, Greene berates him as “an absolute Johannes factotum” or jack-of-all-trades. He also intimates that, having supplied Shakespeare with lines (either acted or purloined), he had on his death-bed now been “forsaken.”“Trust them not,” he warns, and calls Shakespeare an “vpstart Crow beautified with our feathers” whose “Tygers hart”(an allusion to The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York) is “wrapt inn a Players hyde.” Accused of being an unlearned (“vpstart”) plagiarist, Shakespeare would have questioned “unlearned”-although he had not attended university, his plays are stuffed with classical allusions – but he could hardly deny the charge of plagiarism; his early plays were bedecked with lines and echoes from Marlowe.