Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan 1592-1623 9781472555496, 9781408130148, 9781408139189

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THE ARDE N SHAKE SPE ARE L IB RA RY

Shakespeare upstARt crow to sweet swan 1592–1623

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THE ARDE N SHAKE SPE ARE L IB RA RY

SHAKESPEARE Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan 1592–1623 KATHERINE DUNCAN-JONES

Arden Shakespeare 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 First published in 2011 by Methuen Drama Copyright © Katherine Duncan-Jones 2011 Arden Shakespeare is an imprint of Methuen Drama Methuen Drama A & C Black Publishers Limited 36 Soho Square London W1D 3QY www.methuendrama.com www.ardenshakespeare.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 408 13014 8 Available in the USA from Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 175 Fifth Avenue, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10010. www.BloomsburyAcademicUSA.com Typeset by Country Setting, Kingsdown, Kent Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems – without the written permission of A & C Black Publishers Limited. This book is produced using paper made from wood grown in managed, sustainable forests. It is natural, renewable and recyclable. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. Available in the USA from Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 175 Fifth Avenue, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10010. www.BloomsburyAcademicUSA.com

CONTENTS list of illustrations preface

vii ix

Prologue Kill-cow

1 Chapter One

Upstart Crow

27

Chapter Two Three Early Readers

55

Chapter Three Poet and Gentleman

92

Chapter Four The Rival Poets

129

Chapter Five Silver-tonguèd Melicert

155

Chapter Six Groom of the Chamber

192

Chapter Seven Sweet Swan of Avon!

233

appendix

261

abbreviations and references

263

notes

267

index

285

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ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Drawing by Hugh Alley of sheep and cattle being driven to market in London (1598). A caveat for the citty of London, or, A forewarninge of offences against penall laws, p. 11, ‘Escheape: Market’, Folger MS V.a 318, fo.11r. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Page 19 2. Drawing by Ralph Brooke, York Herald, of Shakespeare’s coat of arms (1602), Folger MS V.a 350, p. 28. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Page 31 3. Drawing by Henry Peacham combining two episodes in Titus Andronicus (1594), Longleat House, Harley Papers vol. I, f, 159v. Reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Bath. Page 59 4. Original design of Shakespeare’s coat of arms (1596), including the wording, ‘NON SANZ DROICT’. College of Arms MS. Shakespeare grants 1. By permission of the College of Arms. Page 107 5. W. Hole, engraved portrait of George Chapman, one of Shakespeare’s rivals, 1616: after Unknown Artist © National Portrait Gallery, London. Page 145 6. T. Cecill, engraved portrait of John Weever, one of Shakespeare’s admirers, 1631 © National Portrait Gallery, London. Page 161 7. Queen Elizabeth I among her courtiers: ‘The Royal procession of Queen Elizabeth’ engraved by George Vertue (1742) after painting possibly by Robert Peake the elder (c. 1602) © National Portrait Gallery, London. Page 195 8. Ben Jonson, friend, rival and reluctant admirer of Shakespeare, engraved portrait by Robert Vaughan (c. 1640 ) © National Portrait Gallery, London. Page 239

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PREFACE This book crept up on me unawares, evolving from two previous projects. Writing Ungentle Shakespeare – now re-issued in paperback as Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (2010) – left me still curious about what could lie behind John Aubrey’s account of the boy Shakespeare, when he killed a calf, doing so ‘in a high style’, and making a speech. As chronicled in an article published in The Review of English Studies in 2004, my speculative explorations developed further into what appears here as the book’s Prologue. This concerns the youthful Shakespeare’s reputation as a ‘killcow’. Another project that I had in hand for many years – which gathered full momentum only when Henry Woudhuysen became my more expert collaborator – was the preparation of a new Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Poems, finally published in 2007. Working on Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, I became aware of a mass of early responses to Shakespeare’s writing. Not only were both poems frequently reprinted, they were also quoted, cited, imitated and praised. More than any of Shakespeare’s plays, these two long narrative poems pointed to the existence of a huge fan club ‘out there’. There are also some adverse or mocking responses of the kind often prompted by works that enjoy instant and widespread popularity. This led me to think further about Shakespeare’s interactions with his contemporaries. So far as I am aware, the only previous book-length study along these lines is E.A.J. Honigmann’s Shakespeare’s Impact on his Contemporaries (1982). This is a richly fascinating collection of data and reflection, and I freely acknowledge that it has provided me with numerous thought-provoking suggestions. However, my approach is in several respects different from Honigmann’s. For one thing, as I think I made clear in Ungentle Shakespeare, my approach is even less reverential than his. For another, I am just

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as much interested in the impact of his contemporaries on Shakespeare as the other way round. A brilliant article by MacD.P. Jackson demonstrating by means of close and careful reference that Shakespeare ‘read his reviews’ – in the form of Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (1598) – was published in 2005, at just the right moment to spur me on. In exploring some of the developments of Shakespeare’s reputation and status between the ‘upstart Crow’ attack in 1592 and his apotheosis as ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’ of 1623, this study may seem to labour the obvious. From our perspective, Shakespeare’s was evidently a success story: if not quite a journey from rags to riches, then at least from somewhat decayed provinciality to social, economic and cultural prominence. Seven years after his death he was to be publicly honoured as a national treasure – most conspicuously and tellingly by his friend, rival and critic Ben Jonson, and more quietly by his loyal playing-company colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell. Together, these three men, all of whom had known Shakespeare well, put together his most valuable and enduring memorial, the ‘First Folio’ edition of thirty-six of his plays. But my main focus here is on Shakespeare’s complex interactions with his contemporaries while he was alive. From this viewpoint, his commanding success was by no means such a foregone conclusion. Some of the earliest surviving responses to the man and his talents are critical, even positively hostile. There are also allusions in the Jacobean period that suggest episodes of social failure and disappointment, as well as outbreaks of mockery of Shakespeare’s writing on the part of younger writers such as Francis Beaumont. I try to probe the texture and detail of various complex interactions between Shakespeare and other writers, such as Henry Chettle, John Weever, Francis Meres and George Chapman. Some of this material is explored in rather minute detail, since it has not been much investigated before. Shakespeare’s relations with Ben Jonson, however, are both well documented and widely discussed, which is why I decided to defer my treatment of them to the final chapter, and to keep it relatively brief.

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This is not a biography, but it incorporates some quasibiographical strands. In the opening ‘Prologue’ I suggest that Shakespeare’s godfather may have been a Stratford butcher, and that early familiarity both with slaughterhouses and with theatrical entertainments associated with butchers and butchery had some imaginative impact on his writings. These are scenarios that future biographers may want to consider further. From the first chapter onwards I argue – on the basis of evidence – both that Shakespeare was a skilful actor, who performed leading roles, and that his performing activities continued throughout his career in tandem with writing. After all, the fact that he was a versatile actor, as well as a versatile writer, was a major reason why he provoked envy among playwrights of the late 1580s, especially those known as the ‘University Wits’. These graduate playwrights could compose plays, but could not command the higher profile and more sustained economic rewards that ensued from playing, and sharing the profits of a successful playing company. In Chapter 2 I look at detailed responses to works by Shakespeare recorded by three contemporary readers/auditors. The next two chapters concern Shakespeare’s social and cultural status. In Chapter 3 I suggest that early in the reign of James I Shakespeare and his friend and colleague Richard Burbage were both being spoken of as likely to achieve some kind of honour, probably that of knighthood, an honour with which the new King was notoriously lavish. Evidently this didn’t happen, but reverberations of some such disappointment may be heard in a few of the 1609 Sonnets. What stood most immovably in the path of these two outstandingly brilliant men was that they were performers on public stages. The acting profession carried considerable social stigma. Continuing prejudice against it has also, I believe, fuelled the determination of most modern scholars to believe that Shakespeare must have given up acting as soon as he possibly could. In Chapter 4, I examine some of Shakespeare’s complex interactions with other writers, especially as reflected in the so-called ‘Rival Poet(s)’ sonnets. In Chapter 5 I return to Shakespeare’s

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admirers, critics and imitators, closing with a detailed – though by no means exhaustive – exploration of the conflicted responses of Henry Chettle. In Chapter 6 I explore Shakespeare’s relations with the court of Elizabeth I, with particular reference to three plays that were certainly performed there, and a fourth, Richard II, that may well have been. I argue that Shakespeare’s contribution to Robert Chester’s Loves martyr also has strong court connections. In Chapter 7 I re-examine the much-discussed ‘Poets’ War’, offering a new theory about the manner in which, as reported by some of Shakespeare’s admirers at St John’s College, Cambridge, Shakespeare administered a definitive ‘purge’ to the ‘pestilent’ Ben Jonson in the aftermath of the latter’s Poetaster. After Shakespeare’s death, however, Jonson praised and honoured Shakespeare’s writings in a long poem prefaced to the ‘First Folio’, and bestowed on him the title of ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’. The preliminaries of the Folio furnish further evidence that Shakespeare continued to perform to the end of his active life. I have already mentioned the two scholars to whom I am most deeply indebted. Henry Woudhuysen has read all my drafts, and his comments, encouragement and painstaking corrections have all been invaluable. His pains have extended to a major examination of quotations against their sources. Errors that persist are certainly my own. My communications with the Antipodean Mac Jackson have been both less frequent and more remote, but I have received enormous enlightenment both from his recent published work and from email conversations with him about various matters, especially with reference to the ‘Rival Poets’ discussed in Chapter 4. An early version of this chapter was also read by Professor Martin Dodsworth, who made some very helpful comments on it. I delivered a spiced-up version of it as a lecture in Oxford in the summer of 2009 to mark the 400th anniversary of the first publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The Prologue owes much to Robert Bearman, who generously put me straight on various documented facts while politely refraining from remonstrating with me for being wildly speculative. John Tobin read a version of Chapter 1, and encouraged me to a publish it, at a

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point when I was not yet quite sure whether what I had in hand was a book or just a clutch of articles. Alan H. Nelson kindly gave me advance access to his article, written in collaboration with Paul H. Altrocchi, on Shakespeare as ‘our Roscius’. An early version of Chapter 1 was delivered as a paper in the University of Reading under the chairmanship of Ralph Houlbrooke. More recently, I delivered a shortened version of Chapter 2 at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford. I am grateful to Kate McLuskie and Martin Wiggins, among others, for their helpful responses. My Somerville colleague Barbara Harvey read Chapter 3, and made some helpful and learned comments on the respective ranks of gentlemen and esquires. A version of the third section of Chapter 3 appeared in the Times Literary Supplement as ‘Shakespeare’s Status Anxiety’ (11 April 2006). There are many other scholars to whom I am indebted both for their published work and for direct communication. Among others, they include Kate Bennett, Ian Gadd, Andrew Gurr, Helen Hackett, Laurie Maguire, Richard Proudfoot, Jason ScottWarren, Emma Smith and Tiffany Stern. Last but far from least, this book has benefited greatly both from Nick de Somogyi’s exemplary copy-editing and Simon Trussler’s expert typography. The eagle-eyed Margaret Berrill spied some errors missed even by Nick (who also prepared the index). I owe more than I can say to the unfailingly helpful staff of the Bodleian Library, especially those of the Upper Reading Room Reserve: David Busby, Ernesto Gomez, Sally Matthews and Vera Ryhajlo. More mornings than not in the course of the last five years they have been my support system, and neither their expertise nor their good-humoured willingness to take trouble has ever appeared to flag.

AUTHOR’S NOTE All quotations from Shakespeare’s literary works, and their abbreviated titles, are taken from the most recent Arden editions. Other quotations are in old spelling, unmodified apart from the regularizing of i/j, u/v, and the expansion of contractions, with letters supplied being italicized. However, I have made an exception for quotations from the long epistles of the former soldier William Reynolds. His orthog raphy is so extraordinary that I thought it would be a kindness to readers to modernize these. Finally, modern dating has been adopted throughout, treating each year as beginning on 1 January rather than 24 March.

PROLOGUE KILL-COW kill-cow n. 1. A swashbuckler, bully, braggadocio; a terrible or great person; a man of importance . . . 3. A nickname for a butcher. rare . . . adj. Bragging, bullying . . . OED

i. calves, cows, prodigals Few Elizabethans have left traces of their lives as small children. When such material does survive it generally relates to individuals of high rank and political eminence. For instance, Dr Thomas Moffett’s exemplary biography of Sir Philip Sidney includes a vignette from his infancy. It sounds too good to be true, yet may be essentially authentic: When as a three-year-old he beheld the moon, with clean hands and head covered he used to pray to it and devoutly to worship – as if in his earliest years he had compassed the heavens with his mind, and wondered at the works of his Creator.1 Moffett (1553–1604) had not known Sidney in his infancy, but had a medical consultation with him in about 1583 concerning his new wife’s ‘slight infertility’. From the early 1590s Moffett lived in the Wilton household of Sidney’s sister Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Perhaps it was from her that he heard this account, and perhaps she in turn had heard it from her parents. It seemed worth remembering after Sidney’s untimely death because it encapsulated an image of him as innately reflective and pious.

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Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan

A single reminiscence survives from Shakespeare’s considerably less privileged childhood. Whether or not it is reliable as reportage, it resembles Moffett’s vignette in encapsulating its subject’s salient attributes as conceived a couple of generations later. It establishes an image of Shakespeare as a writer and performer even in boyhood. Little has been made of it by modern biog raphers. The anecdote opens John Aubrey’s notes on the life of ‘Master William Shakespeare’ (1681): his father was a Butcher, & I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his fathers Trade, but when he kill’d a Calfe, he would doe it in a high style, & make a Speech.2 A parallel oral tradition, seemingly independent of Aubrey’s, links the boy Shakespeare both with Stratford butchers and London playhouses. Writing to a friend in 1693 an Anglo-Irish lawyer called John Dowdall described a recent visit to Holy Trinity, Stratford. He was fully identified only as recently as 2000.3 The octogenarian parish clerk told Dowdall that this Shakespear was formerly in this Towne bound apprentice to a butcher; but that he Run from his master to London, and there was Received ynto the play house as a serviture, & by this meanes had an opportunity to be what he afterwards prov’d. It was a parish clerk’s job to act as recorder of the lives of parishioners. This particular clerk, identified by Chambers as a William Castle baptized in the church on 17 July 1614, may have made it his business, when first appointed, to gather recollections from those who had known the celebrated William Shakespeare as a youth.4 In his highly entertaining book-length survey Shakespeare’s Lives (1970) Samuel Schoenbaum dismissed Aubrey’s story with scorn as a ‘patently ludicrous anecdote’, since Shakespeare’s father’s ‘Trade’ was not butchery, but leather-dressing and glovemaking. But he does not consider that an oral tradition filtered

Prologue

3

through three generations of Henley Street residents may have elided ‘father’ with ‘godfather’. Nor does Schoenbaum have any time for Dowdall’s story, even though a parish clerk might be a more trustworthy witness than Henley Street ‘neighbours’. Like other scholars, he may have been instinctively suspicious of a document first presented to the world by John Payne Collier. William Tyler, a leading Stratford butcher, was a familiar friend and colleague of John Shakespeare’s. There were several middleaged men in Stratford who bore the Christian name ‘William’, but I suggest that it was Tyler who was Shakespeare’s godfather, and possibly followed up this commitment by providing his godson with his first employment. William Tyler’s younger son Richard (born 1566) is one of few Stratford friends below gentry status to be remembered by Shakespeare in his will, with a bequest of 26s. 8d. for a ring. In the final draft Tyler’s name was struck out, as were several others. Yet a continuing relationship with the Shakespeare family is suggested by Richard Tyler’s witnessing a deed of transfer of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars property in 1618.5 Aubrey’s anecdote may reflect later confusion between Shakespeare’s physical ‘father’ and his spiritual ‘godfather’. In this period, bonds forged in baptism, and obligations so incurred, were taken very seriously. Shakespeare left twenty shillings in gold to his own eight-year-old godson, William Walker. Had he lived to see the boy grow up he might have done more for him. In response to a scholarly review of Shakespeare’s Lives by Douglas Hamer in The Review of English Studies 6 Schoenbaum slightly modified his position. Without retreating from his habitual contempt for Aubrey’s testimony, in his Documentary Life (1975) Schoenbaum commented on the anecdote, instead, by means of a rhetorical question: Does there lurk in his [i.e. Aubrey’s] account an obscurely disguised recollection of the boy Shakespeare taking part – with basin, carpet, horns and butcher’s knife and apron – in the Christmas mumming play of the killing of the calf?

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Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan

Detailed evidence for such ‘mumming plays’ is fragmentary. Hamer alluded to a calf-killing show performed for Henry VIII’s daughter Princess Mary at Christmas 1521: ‘Item, paid to a man at Wyndesore, for kylling a calfe before my ladys grace behynde a clothe’. ‘It was something to please a child of five’, said Hamer. He went on to link this early Tudor entertainment with a domestic calf-killing show still performed by children in Derbyshire in the early twentieth century. In neither of these shows did any real calves suffer, but a crude and presumably comic illusion was created with a pair of horns, a basin of blood, and some lively ‘noises off ’ behind a screen. Whether in the sixteenth century or the twentieth, ‘calf-killing’ playlets seem to have been especially associated with the great meat-eating feast of Christmas, a season when older children often returned to the parental home. It seems likely that the parable of the Prodigal Son and his father’s killing of the ‘fatted calf ’ to celebrate his return provided such spectacles with a narrative and exemplary framework (Luke, 15.11–31). The parable was certainly an extremely popular theme for Tudor interludes. As E.K. Chambers observed in his great study of The Mediaeval Stage: The Acolastus (1530, acted 1529) of William Gnaphaeus and the Asotus (1537, written 1507) of George Macropedius began a cycle of ‘Prodigal Son’ plays which had many branches.7 These were felt to be especially suitable for performance and viewing by schoolboys. In what may be Shakespeare’s earliest surviving play, The Comedy of Errors, the officer who arrests Antipholus of Ephesus for debt is mockingly described by Dromio of Syracuse as ‘he that goes in the calf ’s-skin that was killed for the prodigal’ (4.3.17–18).8 This is glossed by editors as indicating that the sergeant wears a leather jerkin, as sergeants traditionally did. R.A. Foakes discerns an implied contrast between the punitive sergeant and the Prodigal’s generously forgiving father.9 But there could also be an allusion to the calf-skin worn by an amateur player who had been cast in the less than stellar role of

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‘Calf ’ in a Prodigal Son interlude or mumming show, as well as a broad suggestion that the sergeant is rather stupid. I shall return to the alleged stupidity of calves. Dromio’s ensuing description of the officer as ‘he that came behind you, sir, like an evil angel’ suggests that at this point in The Comedy of Errors Shakespeare is encouraging his audience to think about old plays, for the image recalls scenes from plays such as Mankynde or Doctor Faustus in which an ‘Evil Angel’ stands behind the protagonist. The parable of the Prodigal Son was also extremely popular as a subject for pictorial representation in the Tudor period, especially on the walls of taverns, where it seems to have been something of a cliché. Appropriately for such a convivial environment, the story offered scope for two scenes of extensive feasting. The first is that of the Son’s ‘riotous living’ among harlots, far away from home, the second that of the lavish feast, with music and dancing, with which his father celebrated his younger son’s return. Among the scornful and blasphemous ‘opinions’ that Thomas Kyd attributed to Christopher Marlowe shortly before the latter was murdered is a cynical gloss on the scene of the Prodigal Son’s departure that assumed (in the phrase ‘all pictures’) that everyone was familiar with the iconographic conventions of such paintings. Allegedly, Marlowe used to say That the prodigall Childes portion was but fower nobles, he held his purse so neere the bottom in all pictures, and that it either was a jest or els fowr nobles then was thought a great patrimony not thinking it a parable.10 Shakespeare was certainly familiar with such images. In The Merry Wives of Windsor the Host of the Garter boasts that the large first-floor chamber occupied by his long-stay guest Sir John Falstaff has been ‘painted about with the story of the Prodigal, fresh and new’ (4.5.7–8). The Merry Wives intersects here with the moment in 2 Henry IV when Falstaff, over-eagerly anticipating Hal’s succession to the throne and his own immediate advancement, orders Mistress Quickly to procure upmarket drinking glasses, no longer mere metal or earthenware tankards: ‘and for

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thy walls, a pretty slight drollery, or the story of the Prodigal . . . in waterwork’ (2.1.141–4). If we put these two passages together, we may imagine that the banishment of Falstaff and his followers by the new King has excluded both knight and hostess from the East Cheap tavern. On his arrival in Windsor as a ‘Poor Knight’ on a royal pension Falstaff has commissioned these paintings, instead, for his large chamber in the Garter Inn.11 In both cases what is referred to is fresco, painting done on wet plaster that is ‘fresh and new’, known to the Elizabethans as ‘waterwork’. This was a more modish wall decoration than ragged old tapestries. As enlarged by Douglas Hamer’s suggestions, Aubrey’s anecdote opens up routes for further inquiry. One concerns the documented dramatic activities of butchers and whittawers. Schoenbaum was correct in saying that whittawers and glovers were explicitly forbidden to slaughter animals on their own premises. Yet butchery was not so very far away from ‘whittawing’, the bleaching and softening of animal skins. Like the farmer and the cowboy in Oklahoma!, the butcher and the whittawer should be friends. Whittawers obtained animal skins from butchers, and butchers profited commercially from these transactions. A Stratford family with whom the Shakespeares of Henley Street were particularly familiar, the Tylers of Sheep Street, were butchers. In 1558 William Tyler and John Shakespeare shared a term of office as constables, Dogberry and Verges-like. In 1564–5 the butcher William Tyler officiated as the town’s bailiff, and the glover John Shakespeare, as one of the town’s chamberlains, helped him to make up his accounts. Two years later John Shakespeare himself was elected bailiff.12 As already mentioned, Tyler’s son Richard (born 1566) appears to have been a long-term friend of the poet, and was to be remembered in his will. His elder brother Adrian (born 1563) was closer in age to the future poet, and they may have been in the same class at the grammar school. I think we can safely conjecture that the Shakespeare children were familiar with the Tyler ‘shambles’, or slaughterhouse. Butchers have never been famed for their delicacy. Tyler may have regarded his skills in the shambles as a good form of

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entertainment for small boys. A modern example of a slaughterhouse as a place where little boys are coarsely entertained appears in the recollections of the Tudor historian A.L. Rowse. He recalled being taken by his father to the ‘killin’-’ouse’ of Fred May, the local butcher in Tregonissey, in Cornwall, whom for a time he believed to be his true father: My earliest memory of him is that time when in the slaughter-house at Tregonissey, after a killing, he took me up in his arms and shut me inside the slit carcase of a pig. I remember reacting violently, aged three, kicking him in the stomach and using all the swear words I had heard him use.13 Even if Tyler Senior didn’t bring his sons and his sons’ friend into quite such close proximity to fresh carcasses as this, he may have encouraged all the boys to admire and study his skill with axe and knife. Once they were big strong lads he may also have enlisted their aid. It has been estimated that a minimum of four men are required for the slaughtering of an eighteen-month-old bullock, so two or three were probably required even for a less mature beast.14 If the parish clerk’s report to Dowdall is credited, it is possible that Shakespeare was formally apprenticed to Tyler, aged somewhere between sixteen and eighteen. This would have rendered his marriage problematic, since apprentices were supposed to remain unmarried until they were fully ‘freed’. Traditional associations between butchers and whittawers were cultural as well as professional. In the nearby City of Coventry the butchers’ guild frequently collaborated with the whittawers in equipping a pageant wagon for such feasts as Holy Trinity and Midsummer’s Eve during the mid-fifteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries.15 One record of a payment of 13s. 4d. by the butchers to the whittawers explains that it was made ‘calling to mind the old acquaintance and amity that has long continued by means of buying and selling between them [i.e. the butchers] and the whittawers’.16 Coventry’s whittawers’ guild is patchily documented, with a gap of about 130 years in its surviving records.

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But regular collaborations of whittawers with butchers confirm the close relationship between the two crafts. The traditional subject matter of pageants sponsored by Coventry whittawers at Corpus Christi is unknown. But in Chester in 1539–40 the glovers and parchment-makers (these, too, were whiteners and stretchers of animal skins) performed ‘the rising of Lazarus from death to lyff ’.17 In York, Beverley and Wakefield the pageant wagon sponsored by the glovers showed Cain killing Abel. In addition to its religious and dramatic functions, it seems that the pageant wagon sponsored by a craft guild could serve as a splendid shop window ‘to display the goods normally offered by them’.18 Alan D. Justice suggests that many of the York pageants included at least one splendid ‘prop’ exhibiting the particular skill of that guild. The weavers, for instance, performed ‘The Appearance of Our Lady to Thomas’, a drama whose climax was the Virgin’s gift to Thomas of her beautifully woven girdle. The chandlers (candlemakers) showed ‘The Angels and Shepherds’, and may have made use of ‘a large piece of wax imagery in the shape of an angel’. The marshals, who shoed horses, showed the ‘Flight into Egypt’, and prepared a splendidly saddled and shod horse on which the Holy Family rode away through the streets of Bethlehem/Coventry.19 The text of the ‘Cain and Abel’ play at York is fragmentary and ‘somewhat disordered’.20 However, Justice suggests that When the angel assails Cain with the curse of God, Cain responds by striking the angel . . . it is possible that when Cain struck the angel, he used a glove or gauntlet, and that the blow might have been intended as a challenge.21 Such a scene would provide the Coventry glovers with the desired opportunity to display a masterpiece of their own workmanship as the pageant’s climax, in the form of an especially splendid glove or gauntlet. It would also be apt for Cain, who cultivated beasts rather than crops, to make conspicuous use of leather products. We cannot be certain that Shakespeare saw such a play. But he does make seven allusions to Cain, all in the first half of his career.22 Simple’s comic description of Master Slender in The

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Merry Wives of Windsor as sporting ‘a little yellow beard: a Caincoloured beard’ may reflect a stage tradition as well as an iconographic one. It is striking that the line is spoken in immediate response to Mistress Quickly’s question ‘Does he not wear a great round beard, like a glover’s paring-knife?’, thus locating an image from the glover’s workshop in close proximity to one of Cain (1.4.18–21). But though the proximity of a technical allusion to gloving and what could be a theatrical allusion to Cain is remarkable, we must bear in mind that it is not absolutely certain either that ‘Cain and Abel’ was the narrative presented by whittawers in the Midlands, or that a glove or gauntlet figured in such a pageant. What we do know is that by the late seventeenth century the Coventry guild bore the collective title of ‘Whittawers, Glovers, Fellmongers and Parchment-makers Company’. This indicates the close professional ties between the many craftsmen whose skill was to treat animal skins, and who, in turn, were all reliant on the craft of the butchers who killed and expertly skinned cattle, sheep, pigs, deer and dogs. It is highly probable that the Shakespeare family visited Coventry on high days and holy days such as Corpus Christi, and that they looked with especially keen interest at pageants presented by butchers and others who worked with leather. Coventry is only twenty miles from Stratford, and many craftsmen made considerably longer journeys than that in order to witness the Coventry shows. During the late fifteenth century Shrewsbury mercers were repeatedly fined for travelling to Coventry at Corpus Christi time to see the shows there, rather than supporting Shrewsbury’s own less magnificent Corpus Christi pageants.23 Lavish plays and pageants continued to be performed in Coventry well into the reign of Elizabeth I. Despite the economic decline and depopulation that has caused late medieval Coventry to be characterized by some demographic historians as a city of ‘desolation’, its major seasonal spectacles continued virtually uninterrupted during Shakespeare’s adolescence.24 The Corpus Christi pageants were performed annually up to and including 1579. As Beatrice Groves has observed:

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It seems highly likely . . . that a young man interested in theatre would have travelled the short road between Stratford and Coventry to see the most famous dramatic presentation of his day, and Shakespeare could have seen the Coventry cycle at any time up to his fifteenth year.25 After a couple of years’ intermission, the late medieval Corpus Christi pageants were replaced in 1581 by an even more lavish sequence, more consonant with the reformed faith, called ‘The Destruction of Jerusalem’. Coventry’s tradition of plays performed by craftsmen had been given a magnificent boost by the Queen’s visit to Kenilworth and its environs in July 1575. Her host, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, commissioned the men of Coventry to come to Kenilworth to perform their Hock Tuesday play enacting the defeat of the Danes near Coventry in 1012. This piece was remarkable for showing ‘how valiauntly oour english weemen for loove of theyr cuntree behaved themselvez’. It culminated in a scene in which English women led away bound Danish captives.26 Elizabeth enjoyed the play so much that after seeing only part of it she rewarded the Coventry men generously, and asked to ‘have it ful oout’ the following day, ‘whearat her Majesty laught well’.27 Though Stephen Greenblatt calls the show a ‘commemoration of an ancient massacre’,28 according to Robert Langham’s account the opposing forces in the play were evenly matched – ‘great waz the activitee that day too be seen thear a both sidez’.29 The action consisted for the most part of a comical but vigorous mock-battle in which the English forces were eventually led to victory by the romance-loving Captain Cox, a home-grown precursor of Don Quixote: ‘Twise the Danes had the better, but at the last conflict, beaten doown, overcom and many led captive for triumph by our English weemen.’ If Shakespeare saw this play, whether in 1575 or later, it may have influenced the treatment of battle-scenes in his early history plays. The next sections are more speculative. If we think about Shakespeare’s boyhood in Stratford, as Aubrey’s anecdote invites us to do, it seems that he must have had early and intimate

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acquaintance with animal skins, both raw and treated. In a period when children were given very few ‘dedicated’ toys, playing with and dressing up in some of John Shakespeare’s raw hides hanging up in readiness for bleaching and stretching must have been hugely tempting to the Shakespeare children. It was usual to leave beasts’ heads on the whole hides. Might William have dressed one of his younger brothers, Gilbert or Richard, in a calf-skin, while he himself, as eldest brother, performed the part of a butcher ‘in a high style’? Within the privacy of the Henley Street house there might have been a part, too, for William’s younger sister Joan. The Prodigal Son story rather neatly offered four chief roles: the Prodigal Son, his virtuous elder brother, their father, and the unfortunate calf. Might such childish romps have developed so powerfully as to function as rehearsals for ‘mummings’ or ‘disguisings’ that were vividly remembered by ‘neighbours’ in Stratford whose descendants talked to Aubrey? In ‘disguisings’, much loved by Henry VIII, groups of young men in fancy dress would bang on the doors of wealthy households at holiday times and insist on being admitted to entertain the assembled company. And if the Shakespeare children – who more and more resemble the Marx Brothers in my imagination – performed such shows in the neighbourhood of Stratford, could they have given their scripts a local Warwickshire resonance? According to local folklore, one of the exploits of the romance hero Guy of Warwick was to slay the Dun Cow of Dunsmore Heath. Though never narrated verbally either in verse romances or prose chronicles, this feat was depicted in the early fourteenth century in the splendid British Library royal manuscript known as the ‘Smithfield Decretals’.30 According to Velma Richmond in her magnificent study The Legend of Guy of Warwick, ‘today school children write essays about Guy’s victory, public houses and hotels near Dunsmore Heath are called “The Dun Cow”, and several modern poets allude to the creature’.31 Shakespeare mentions Dunsmore in 3 Henry VI (5.1.3), a scene set outside the walls of Coventry. Michael Drayton, his coeval and fellow Warwickshireman, wrote about Dunsmore as the site of an

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ancient cross ‘supposed to be the midst of England’, ‘Where those two mightie waies, the Watling and the Fosse, / Our Center seeme to cut’. He also mentions, among the exploits of the local hero Guy of Warwick, that he ‘did quell that monstrous Cow / The passengers that us’d from Dunsmore to affright’.32 Fresh ‘Shakespearean’ interest has gathered around the legend since Helen Cooper’s revisiting of the play about Guy of Warwick, The Tragical History . . . of Guy Earl of Warwick, published as late as 1661, but probably Elizabethan in origin.33 One of the play’s principal characters is a garrulous clown called ‘Sparrow’ who has recently made a girl pregnant in his home town of Stratford-uponAvon, and is irrepressibly ambitious, greedy and self-serving. Guy’s killings of the ‘fell savage Bore of Calledon’ and of ‘the wild Cow of Dunsmore Heath’ are briefly touched on in a prologue by ‘Time’, and in the opening scene Rohan remarks that all men muse to think what thou hast done, the Calledonian savage Bore is dead and by thy hand the wild Cow slaughtred That kept such Revels upon Dunsmore Heath.34 It is possible that the surviving text is the second part of a twopart sequence, the first culminating in Guy’s knighthood and marriage to Phillis, the second in his death. Guy’s English feats, including the killing of the Dun Cow, may have been narrated in the triumphant Part 1, his expiatory crusade to the Holy Land and long-delayed return to England being enacted in the tragical Part 2. Aubrey’s anecdote, with its italicized phrase, ‘a high style’, suggests that the boy Shakespeare’s calf-killing orations were tragic. Yet if they were connected with the Warwickshire legend of Guy and the Dun Cow I wonder whether, like the Coventry men’s battle with the Danes, they incorporated elements of burlesque or pantomime. The deadly machismo involved in killing bulls as a form of entertainment is still familiar to us, for it continues in Spain and the South of France. But for a fully armed knight to kill a cow, rather than a bull, seems at best comic, and at

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worst deeply ungallant and unsporting, especially if a strand of the folk tale described by Velma Richmond was part of the legend current in Shakespeare’s youth. She describes a large bas-relief image of Guy and the Cow in a pub on Dunsmore Heath called ‘At the Sign of the Dun Cow’. Its inscription explains that the problem with the cow was that she was producing so much milk that the farmer who owned her didn’t know how to deal with the surplus. He enlisted the help of a witch, whose intervention drove the cow mad. Killing a cow – even a mad one – seems unheroic enough. Images of mad cows are now familiar to us from outbreaks of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. But these are wretched, bony, stumbling creatures for whom slaughter seems merciful. Killing a large, healthy cow whose chief symptom was that she was over-productive of milk seems both perverse and tasteless, almost like killing a nursing mother. Many visual depictions of Guy and the Dun Cow, such as the early fourteenth-century one in the ‘Smithfield Decretals’, and the much later one in the 1680 chapbook The Famous History of Guy of Warwick, do appear distinctly mock-heroic or comic in their treatment of his feat. But does the Dun Cow fable really have any connection with Shakespeare? After all, Aubrey’s anecdote, derived from residents of Henley Street – great-grandchildren, possibly, of John Shakespeare’s neighbours in the 1570s and 1580s – mentions the slaughter of calves, not of full-grown milk-producing cows. Much hangs upon the Tragical History’s strangely close biographical parallels between the clown ‘Sparrow’ and the youthful William Shakespeare. It is striking, for instance, that Sparrow has not only made a local girl pregnant, but is the grammar-school educated son of a powerful but unlettered father. There is a further text that could possibly connect Shakespeare with Guy the Cow Slayer, and/or butcher’s apprentice. In late sixteenth-century English the word ‘kill-cow’ was a popular slang expression for ‘a swashbuckler, bully, braggadocio’; as an adjective it meant ‘bragging, bullying; terrifying’. It could occasionally denote a butcher.35 The term was liked by Thomas Nashe, who used it in his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon

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(1589) in a passage in which he attacks the swaggering eloquence of some newly arrived non-graduate poets who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) thinke to out-brave better pennes with the swelling bumbast of bragging blanke verse. Indeede it may bee the ingrafted overflow of some kil-cow conceit, that overcloyeth their imagination with a more then drunken resolution.36 When closely studied, Nashe’s strangest images often turn out to allude to something specific and extremely topical which will be fully understood by only a few of his readers. If this passage carries an allusion to, and onslaught on, the upstart William Shakespeare, lately arrived in London from the Midlands, it could suggest that he brought with him a local reputation as a histrionic cow-killer, as well as a talent for overblown rhetoric. There also seems to be a connection between this passage and the better-known one discussed in the next chapter, in which an actor who is an ‘upstart Crow’ ‘supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you’. If, again, the late seventeenth-century parish clerk’s report to John Dowdall is to be believed, the Cambridge-educated Nashe and Greene may also have known that the braggart had formerly been apprenticed to a butcher in Warwickshire. Nashe’s remarks could allude to the Dun Cow’s excess of milk in the words ‘overflow’, ‘overcloyeth’ and ‘more then drunken’. This is all highly conjectural. I am also aware that some scholars regard his preface to Menaphon as being too early to incorporate an allusion to Shakespeare, despite or even because of the passage a few pages later about ‘whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of Tragicall speeches’. Yet a growing body of scholarship supports the notion that Shakespeare himself may have been a co-author of the Hamlet play that undoubtedly existed in the late 1580s. I for one am convinced that he made an ‘early start’, both as a player and a writer. There may have been further plays, in addition to 1 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, to which he contributed as ‘poet’ as well as performer.

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To sum up the speculations that Aubrey’s anecdote prompts: Shakespeare and his siblings may have played with animal skins at an early age in their father’s workshop. The games they played at home may have been influenced both by the real-life spectacle of animals being killed in Stratford slaughterhouses, especially that of their father’s close friend and business partner William Tyler of Sheep Street, and by local drama and folklore. The latter included the biblical plays performed at Coventry, and perhaps interludes concerning the Prodigal Son acted out in class at the local grammar school. A further influence could have been local folklore concerning the romance hero Guy of Warwick and his killing of the Dun Cow of Dunsmore Heath. William and his brothers may have performed a ‘disguising’ or mumming show that became celebrated in Stratford and its environs as a Christmas, Hock Tuesday or Whitsuntide show. It may even have been on the strength of his panache in devising and performing such shows that Shakespeare was first recruited by a playing company as a hired man or ‘factotum’ who could both write and act. Given the parallels drawn by court poets such as Spenser between Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the romance hero Guy of Warwick, the fame of such a piece could lead very naturally to Shakespeare’s recruitment to the poorly documented yet evidently talented company of Leicester’s Men.37 It was from this company that members of the more high-profile Queen’s Men were normally recruited. A Stratford-based calf-killing show could even have been devised with a view to attracting the notice of Leicester’s friends and servants. If Shakespeare began his professional career with Leicester’s Men it could only have been before September 1588, when Leicester died. It is possible that the fame of his cow-killing performances followed him to London in the late 1580s, where it was picked up and ridiculed by the ever alert Thomas Nashe.

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ii. butchery in shakespeare’s plays Images of calf- and cow-killing occur frequently in Shakespeare’s plays, especially early on in his writing career. Edgar Fripp has pointed out that Shakespeare’s writings suggest close acquaintance both with butchery and with the technicalities of leatherdressing. Whether or not the allusion in Sonnet 111 to ‘the dyer’s hand’, ‘subdued / To what it works in’, refers specifically to the dyeing of leather, many passages in these plays undoubtedly allude to animal slaughter or to the processing of animal skins, or both. Hamlet, preoccupied by the physical transformations undergone by dead bodies, expresses intense interest in such matters when he says to Horatio, in the graveyard scene, ‘Is not parchment made of sheepskins?’, to which Horatio replies: ‘Ay, my lord, and of calves’ skins too’ (5.1.107–8). The implication here is that legal documents such as deeds of conveyance of property partake of the vacant idiocy of the sheep or calves on whose stretched skins they are inscribed. Calves were, of course, associated with folly and clumsiness, as a much better-known line earlier in the play clearly indicates. When Polonius reminisces about his glory days as a student actor – ‘I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’th’ Capitol. Brutus killed me’ – Hamlet snubs him with a quibbling quip: ‘It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there’ (3.2.99–101), suggesting that Polonius was a foolish youth. It has been suggested recently that this exchange, anticipating Hamlet’s stabbing of Polonius through the arras (3.4.20–22), alludes to traditional calf-killing shows ‘performed as shadowplay behind a curtain’.38 The equation of a foolish, clumsy young man whose legs have outgrown his brain with a ‘calf ’ who will not be much missed when slaughtered was widespread in the period. Applications of it occur throughout Shakespeare’s work. Love’s Labour’s Lost has four or five such satiric uses of ‘calf ’, and Much Ado About Nothing has three. In 2 Henry IV ‘Bullcalf ’ is among the disposable rustics recruited by Falstaff as ‘food for powder’. Trinculo’s unpleasant name for Caliban in The Tempest is ‘mooncalf ’.

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But other images of calves and calf-killing in Shakespeare’s earliest plays are more complex, and require closer examination. King John is a play which I am inclined, with E.A.J. Honigmann and L.A. Beaurline, to date very early, composed perhaps in or soon after the summer of 1588, as a piece of post-Armada, antipapal, English triumphalism.39 It suggests a positive obsession with calves. In the opening scene, in which Philip Falconbridge, the Bastard, claims to be the son of Richard, Coeur de Lion, the King speaks contemptuously to Philip’s elder brother, Robert Falconbridge: In sooth, good friend, your father might have kept This calf, bred from his cow, from all the world. (1.1.123–4) He alludes to the proverb ‘Who bulls the cow must keep the calf ’. That is, even if it was Richard Coeur de Lion, rather than Falconbridge Senior, who begat the younger son Philip, Lady Falconbridge’s husband, as his legal father, was responsible for the boy’s upkeep. The implied contrast between a courageous lion (Richard the Lionheart) and a cowardly calf is developed a good deal further in Act 3, scene 1, and underlined in visual imagery. The Duke of Austria, who wears a lion’s skin and is allied with the King of France, is repeatedly taunted as cowardly, and unfit to wear such an emblem. The first taunt comes from Constance: Thou wear a lion’s hide! Doff it for shame, And hang a calves-skin on those recreant limbs. (3.1.128–9) The Bastard so much admires this sally that he picks up Constance’s second line and repeats it three times in the course of the scene. On the third occasion (3.1.220), when Austria has revealed himself to be a supporter of the Pope’s legate Cardinal Pandulph, the taunt takes on a further layer of satire, though one that will be lost on most modern audiences. Since popes were understood to express their wishes through a proclamation called a ‘bull’, a messenger and supporter of the Pope could be very

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aptly insulted by anti-papists as a ‘calf ’. There are further details here that connect King John both with Guy of Warwick and with the dramatization of his story in The Tragical History. In the same long opening scene the Bastard alludes ironically to his weedy half-brother as ‘Colbrand the giant, that same mighty man’ (1.1.225). Colbrand was a legendary Danish giant overcome by Guy of Warwick. Only five lines later, the Bastard, addressed by James Gurney as ‘good Philip’, responds playfully (in the Oxford text), ‘Philip Sparrow, James’. Though it has been suggested that the Bastard rejects the name ‘Philip’ because he should now, since being publicly acknowledged as the son of Coeur de Lion, be called ‘Richard’, this seems distinctly strained, for it is not the Christian name that is definitive of his descent.40 I wonder whether there may not, rather, be an allusion here to The Tragical History, in which Guy of Warwick’s jesting companion, who is at his side both in England and Palestine, is called ‘Philip Sparrow’. Audience members familiar with The Tragical History may have recognized this as the Bastard staking out a claim for analogous proximity to King John, as his mirthful sidekick. Shakespeare seems to have thought again about the Guy of Warwick legend – and perhaps the play based on it – at the very end of his career. In the comical penultimate scene of Henry VIII a Porter and his assistant try to hold back the huge crowds which have gathered in Greenwich in the hope of glimpsing the christening of the newborn Elizabeth, the future Queen. The Porter’s assistant has tried to beat them back, but has broken his stick in the attempt. His master rebukes him for having done ‘nothing’ to hold back the crowd, to which he replies: I am not Samson, nor Sir Guy, nor Colbrand, To mow ’em down before me; but if I spared any That had a head to hit, either young or old, He or she, cuckold or cuckold-maker, Let me ne’er hope to see a chine again – And that I would not for a cow, God save her! (5.3.20–25)

Fig. 1. Drawing by Hugh Alley of sheep and cattle being driven to market in London (1598).

A ‘chine’ of beef was the ribs, or torso. Though the Arden editor does not mention this, the last two lines seem to allude to the Dun Cow of Dunsmore Heath supposedly slain by Guy of Warwick, whose huge ribs were to be seen hung up as a relic in Warwick Castle. The Porter’s man seems to be saying that not only is he less strong than the legendary Guy, unlike him he would not risk his life for the sake of a mere ‘cow’.41 The earlier passages that I quoted from King John suggest, if not contempt for calves, at least contempt for calf-like men. But other passages in Shakespeare’s plays allude to calf-killing in a more complex way. Audiences are invited to empathize strongly with suffering calves, rather than to regard them as comically disposable. The most remarkable example occurs in 2 Henry VI, perhaps the earliest-written of what eventually became a trilogy. The young king has seen his uncle and the realm’s Protector, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, arrested by the order of Suffolk and Beaufort and taken away to imprisonment and inevitable death. He compares his uncle to a doomed calf:

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as the butcher takes away the calf And binds the wretch and beats it when it strains, Bearing it to the bloody slaughterhouse, Even so remorseless have they borne him hence; And as the dam runs lowing up and down, Looking the way her harmless young one went, And can do nought but wail her darling’s loss, Even so myself bewails good Gloucester’s case . . . (3.1.210–17) This is the young king’s most impassioned speech in the play so far, and marks a major development in his political and theatrical status. These gut-wrenchingly painful images convey his anguish at the removal from him of the only father-figure he has known. But his words are also, of course, the rhetoric of propaganda. The king, whose literal relationship to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, has been like that of child to parent, uses the calf-killing image to reverse their relationship, as well as his own gender. He identifies himself with the ‘dam’ and Humphrey with her ‘calf ’ to underline his utter repudiation of the charges of corruption brought against Humphrey by Suffolk and Beaufort. By comparing his uncle to a ‘harmless young one’ Henry suggests that the late middle-aged Gloucester is as innocent as the babe unborn, and by implying that the cow is still suckling her calf he also emphasizes the close bond between uncle and nephew. The simile is calculated to tug at the heart-strings of audiences. Despite or even because of the fact that animal slaughter was ubiquitous, many early moderns detested it. For instance, the great Protestant martyrologist John Foxe wrote in 1548 that he could not pass near a shambles ‘but that my mind recoils with a feeling of pain’.42 Whether they lived in town or country, people were familiar with the sight of calves being led to slaughter. Even in London, as shown by the image of East Cheap market in the illustrated treatise of 1598 known as ‘Hugh Alley’s Caveat’, animals could regularly be seen being driven to slaughter, exhausted after a trek from surrounding farms.43 None of the

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many repeated attempts to prohibit the slaughtering of cattle within the City of London was successful. As Hugh Alley showed, the City streets had several extensive arrays of butchers’ stalls with slaughterhouses behind, for instance in Mountgodard Street, only a few yards north of St Paul’s Cathedral.44 In evoking an image of a calf who appears to be still a ‘weanling’ Shakespeare alludes to a seasonal activity, for there were also repeated prohibitions on the slaughter of calves, defined as beasts less than two years old, as this practice was believed to contribute to high prices and meat shortages. Since full prohibitions were never effective, a ‘close season’ was imposed forbidding the slaughter of calves except between Easter and November.45 As well as still thinking about butchery in general, Shakespeare continued to be preoccupied with the killing of calves in 2 Henry VI.46 In the very next scene, after the Duke of Gloucester has been found dead in his bed, Warwick picks up the king’s image of a butcher killing a calf and develops it to incriminate the Duke of Suffolk and Cardinal Beaufort: Who finds the heifer dead, and bleeding fresh, And sees fast by a butcher with an axe, But will suspect ’twas he that made the slaughter? (3.2.188–90) Once again, the simile draws on the innocent and pitiable quality of a slaughtered animal to emphasize what Warwick, too, believes to be Gloucester’s essential innocence. It is also striking that again, as if to stress his innocence more strongly, there is a change of gender, dead Gloucester being identified with a ‘heifer’ rather than a bullcalf. 2 Henry VI also includes the only appearance in Shakespeare’s plays of a workaday butcher, Dick the Butcher of Ashford, right-hand man to the rebel Jack Cade. True to the popular stereotype of his craft, Dick is a loud, greedy and bellicose man, whose moderately sized cameo role includes the celebrated line, always a hit with audiences, ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’ (4.2.71). Butchers had every reason to resent the law, which imposed many restrictions on their craft, such as

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the sanction on killing animals in Lent, as well as the seasonal restrictions mentioned above. In 3 Henry VI the images of butchers and butchery that pervade the whole cycle reach a tragical climax. The Queen, Margaret of Anjou, stands by as her only son, Edward, is stabbed repeatedly before her eyes, first by King Edward, and then by his brothers, Richard, soon to become Richard III, and George, Duke of Clarence. Richard exits to deal with the ‘serious matter’ of assassinating the captured Henry VI and leaves the others to bear the onslaughts of Margaret’s grief and rage: They that stabbed Caesar shed no blood at all, Did not offend, nor were not worthy blame, If this foul deed were by to equal it. He was a man; this, in respect, a child, And men ne’er spend their fury on a child. What’s worse than murderer, that I may name it? . . . Butchers and villains! Bloody cannibals! How sweet a plant have you untimely cropped! You have no children, butchers; if you had, The thought of them would have stirred up remorse. (5.5.53–64) As Shakespeare surely knew, this speech was one of the most potent tragical complaints of this early part of his career, even within a body of writing dominated by the rhetoric of femalevoiced complaint, such as the lamentations of Constance in King John, the complaints and curses of the three queens in Richard III, and those of Venus and Lucrece in the narrative poems. Margaret of Anjou’s complaint was to remain in Shakespeare’s creative memory for the rest of his writing life. For instance, in Macbeth, that tragedy whose denouement is the offstage killing of a man finally labelled ‘This bloody butcher’, Macduff alludes explicitly to Margaret’s ‘You have no children’ in his brief, stunned exclamation ‘He has no children’ (4.3.216). These words of shocked grief will be fully understood only by those who recall Margaret’s lines, with their conclusion that no man who had

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children could possibly commit such a deed. Margaret’s speech also alludes to the assassination of Julius Caesar, a topic that Shakespeare may have already planned to write about one day. One woman’s butchery is another man’s morally necessary liquidation. In the first two acts of Julius Caesar Brutus seems determined to deny the ‘brutal’ connotations of his own name, and to persuade both his fellow conspirators and himself that a clear line can be drawn between ‘butchery’, on the one hand, and some sort of ideologically necessary ‘sacrifice’, on the other. He argues that leaving Caesar’s right-hand man Mark Antony alive renders the act of killing Caesar himself lawful and even religious: Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius, To cut the head off and then hack the limbs – Like wrath in death and envy afterwards – For Antony is but a limb of Caesar. Let us be sacrificers but not butchers, Caius . . . And, gentle friends, Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully: Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds. (2.1.161–73) Nevertheless, as soon as he is left alone with Caesar’s body Mark Antony knows just as well as Margaret of Anjou did what label to apply to Caesar’s assassins: ‘O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers’ (3.1.254–5). It is a pity that we don’t know how the killing of Caesar was staged at the newly erected Globe when the play was performed there in 1599. According to Plutarch, on whose accounts Shakespeare was relying, Caesar was ‘hacked and mangled among them, as a wilde beast taken of hunters’, until his best friend and adopted son Brutus ‘gave him one wound about his privities’. Perhaps the actor who played Caesar, matching Plutarch’s account of his ‘running every way with his body’, ran around the stage in a desperate attempt to escape his assassins. This would certainly

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suggest hunting rather than butchery, since in butchery the animal is tied to an iron ring in the floor and held down by several men while it is stunned with an axe and then has its throat cut by the master butcher, with as few contusions or wounds as possible. Among the many offences for which butchers could be fined was supplying skins with an excessive number of ‘gashes’.47 But however the killing was staged, there is no way in which Brutus’s proposal, invented by Shakespeare, that the killers all kneel and bathe their arms ‘Up to the elbows’ in Caesar’s blood could be viewed by a playhouse audience as anything other than a gruesomely repellent bloodbath. Professional butchers wore aprons and tried to keep everything as clean as possible, collecting the beast’s blood carefully in buckets. Then as now, the law required them to do so. Brutus’s command to the conspirators to re-enact and ‘publish’ the assassination with their bloody forearms serves only to make its truly ‘brutal’ nature more visible. Whether or not Shakespeare assisted in the killing of calves in boyhood, there is no doubt that he made repeated and complex uses of images of calf-killing and butchery in his plays. Some of these, such as the speeches of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou, are ‘in a high style’. While many passing allusions to calves are satirical or contemptuous, some of the more sustained examples are more complex. In the second scene of The Winter’s Tale Leontes speaks playfully to his son Mamillius, who has a smudge of dirt on his face: Come, captain, We must be neat – not neat, but cleanly, captain. And yet the steer, the heifer and the calf Are all called neat . . . How now, you wanton calf! Art thou my calf? (1.2.122–7) From playing affectionately with his child, who has a dirty face that makes him not clean and ‘neat’, Leontes moves through wordplay – for ‘neat’ was the generic term applied to any type of

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cattle – to identifying him with a ‘calf ’, with a mixture of tenderness and a sinisterly sudden rush of anxiety about his paternity. Mamillius, Leontes’s ‘calf ’, shares a telling characteristic with other calves alluded to in Shakespeare’s plays. Though he will not be a victim of butchery, he will not live long. Then as now, very few male calves lived to be full grown. The word applied to him by his father so early in the play serves to activate some audience anxiety. This is activated still further when a few lines later Leontes addresses the boy as a ‘collop’, reducing him yet further from a young animal destined for slaughter to a piece of steak cut from such an animal. When Aubrey interviewed neighbours of the Shakespeares in Stratford he may have misunderstood what they told him, being over-literal in his interpretation of an oral tradition that derived from recollections of histrionic and rhetorical activities rather than strictly butcherly ones. Alternatively, however, the neighbours themselves may have literalized such a tradition. Genuinely close professional and personal associations between the Shakespeares of Henley Street and the Tylers of Sheep Street may also have led to a confused recollection that it was John Shakespeare himself who was a butcher, rather than his friend and colleague William Tyler, a man who may have been one of the future poet’s godfathers. However the anecdote evolved, it suggests that local traditions in Stratford characterized Shakespeare as already, in boyhood, both a writer and a performer. I have deferred until last the passage in Aubrey’s ‘Life’ that immediately follows the one discussed in this chapter: ‘There was at that time another Butcher’s son in this Towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall witt, his acquaintance & coetanean, but dyed young.’ Schoenbaum, speculative just for once, raises the possibility that ‘Perhaps this extraordinary natural wit graced Adrian Tyler, son of a Sheep Street butcher who had served as constable with John Shakespeare – the dramatist thought of Adrian’s brother Richard in his will, so the families evidently remained friendly.’48 If Schoenbaum’s identification is correct, the wider explorations offered here suggest that

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William Shakespeare and Adrian Tyler may have grown up virtually as brothers, sharing keen interests in, and talents for, poetic and histrionic inventions that drew inspiration from the apparently unpromising location of a slaughterhouse. For a while they may have been fellow apprentices of Tyler Senior. Perhaps, however, Adrian Tyler did not die very young, for in 1595, aged thirty-two, a man of the same name married a woman called Mary Goard at St Leonard’s, East Cheap, and on 2 March 1596 their daughter Elizabeth was christened at St Andrew Hubbard.49 These events would place him in London at a time when his coeval Shakespeare was also there. However, he may well have predeceased Shakespeare, for he appears to have left no further trace in documentary records.

ONE UPSTART CROW Trust them [‘Puppets’, i.e. actors] not: for there is an upstart 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: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.1

In Sonnets 110 and 111, published in 1609 along with the rest of the sequence, Shakespeare appears to comment on his professional career as an actor on the public stage. In the opening lines of 110 his speaker confesses, as if in response to someone’s reproach against him, that Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view. The word ‘motley’ seems to allude both to the long, multicoloured gown worn by a fool on a public stage or in a noble household, and to the wide variety of different costumes and characters assumed by a professional player, especially one whose position in the company required him to do a lot of ‘doubling’. In this second sense it can be linked with the celebrated attack made on Shakespeare, or ‘ Shake-scene’, in 1592 as ‘an absolute Johannes fac totum’, a man who thinks he is versatile enough both to play all parts and to write all parts, whether on stage or off.2 The Sonnetspeaker’s note of breast-beating confession – ‘Alas, ’tis true’ – reflects awareness that promiscuous self-display as a ‘motley’ player is socially and morally contaminating. In the following sonnet the speaker’s tone of apology and self-inculpation is even more intense. But here he appeals to his interlocutor to blame the goddess Fortune, rather than the poet/speaker, for his many

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freely acknowledged crimes of self-exposure and moral compromise. It was cruel Fortune who ‘did not better for my life provide’. That is, she failed to ensure that the speaker found the circumstances of his life sufficiently prosperous to enable him to enter a more respectable profession. Fortune – the accident of his birth – left him with no better means of economic support ‘Than public means, which public manners breeds’ (Sonnet 111.4). It is hard to read this line as anything other than an allusion to earning money from performing before a socially mixed audience on a public stage, or ‘scene’. Deductions about Shakespeare’s sexual and emotional life from even the most impassioned and personal-seeming of the Sonnets can never be more than speculative, for we have no sound external evidence on such matters with which to verify or refute them. But in the case of allusions to stage-playing and its attendant stigma, such as the lines just quoted, there is plenty of external evidence. We know both that Shakespeare was a professional player, and that his self-exposure on the stage repeatedly provoked disapproval. I have already glanced at the 1592 Groatsworth of witte, where Shakespeare is attacked as a pushy and over-ambitious player. From the end of 1594 he is reliably recorded as a leading member of one of the two major playing companies, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who were later to be adopted as the King’s Men by James I. This earliest surviving record, in the Chamber Accounts, relates to performances of comedies at Greenwich Palace on 26 and 28 December 1594, with William Kempe and Richard Burbage as the other two named servants who received payment.3 In addition to Groatsworth, there are several more early allusions to Shakespeare as an actor and a member of a playing company. In ‘L’Envoy’ appended to his epyllion Narcissus, itself appended to the longer verse narrative Cephalus and Procris, a man called Thomas Edwards presented an admiring round-up of contemporary poets. His book was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 22 October 1593, but seems not to have appeared until 1595. However, since only a single complete exemplar of this edition survives it is possible that an earlier printing has vanished

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altogether. A reference to the book by Nashe in 1596 suggests that Edwards’s poem was one of a number of ‘Pamphlagonian things’ printed by John Wolfe on the personal recommendation of Gabriel Harvey.4 In Edwards’s roll-call of contemporary poets Edmund Spenser is invoked first, as ‘Collyn’. He is praised both for his own poetry and for his account of ‘Sidneys honor’, presumably the elegy Astrophel published in his Complaints (1591). In the following stanza Edwards gestures towards Samuel Daniel. His awkwardly punning phrase ‘Deale we not with Rosamund’ embraces the joint appearance of Daniel’s sonnet sequence Delia with the appended Complaint of Rosamond, published in 1592, and reprinted twice that year. Next come Thomas Watson and Christopher Marlowe, both recently dead, who are alluded to as the amorous lyricists ‘Amintas’ and ‘Leander’. By the time we reach the following stanza Edwards has made it clear that his strategy is to allude to each writer under the name of the principal figure in his best known poem: Adon deafly masking thro, Stately troupes rich conceited, Shew’d he well deserved to, Loves delight on him to gaze And had not love her selfe intreated, Other nymphs had sent him baies.5 There is no doubt, therefore, that Edwards’s ‘Adon’ must allude to Shakespeare, here equated with the beautiful youth, loved by the Goddess of Love herself, who is at the centre of his poem Venus and Adonis (1593). Because Edwards is a clumsy writer, who writes elliptically and uses awkward word order and eccentric diction and orthography, the passage has not hitherto been thought to have very much to tell us either about Shakespeare’s writing or his reputation. Certainly its chief point is simply to eulogize him as the author of Venus and Adonis, who is as much to be admired as the beautiful youth Adonis, and perhaps especially to be admired by female readers (‘nymphs’). However, I believe that the first two lines of this stanza allude to Shakespeare’s status as a

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leading member of a playing company, or ‘stately troop’. OED’s earliest example of ‘troop’ for ‘A company of performers’ is as late as 1779. Nevertheless, other words in these two lines suggest that it has this application here. The connections of ‘masking’ with acting are obvious. Edwards uses the word ‘Maskt’ for performing ‘in sundry shapes’ in Narcissus. The more puzzling term, for a modern reader, is ‘deafly’. However, in this period the adverb ‘deftly’ (often spelt ‘deffly’) seems regularly to have been associated with performance, whether musical or theatrical or both. OED’s supporting quotations include, from Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, ‘They dauncen deffly, and singen soote’;6 and, from Dekker’s A knights Conjuring (1607, sig. K2v), ‘You shall see swaynes defly piping, and virgins chastly dancing’. In Shakespeare’s own Macbeth – though in a passage probably written by Middleton – Hecate summons her fellow-spirits with the words ‘Come high, or low; / Thyself and office deftly show’ (4.1.67–8). The example most directly comparable with Edwards’s comments on ‘Adon’/Shakespeare appears under OED’s entry on ‘deftly’ adv. 2, where – though the sentence is not quoted there in full – it occurs in close proximity to ‘Maskes’. This is in the anti-Marprelate pamphlet The Returne of Pasquill (1589), which was almost certainly written by Thomas Nashe. ‘Marforius’ threatens reprisals against the bishops’ libeller Martin Marprelate in a forthcoming play or entertainment: another new worke which I have in hand, and intituled it, The May-game of Martinisme. Verie defflie set out, with Pompes, Pagents, Motions, Maskes, Scutchions, Emblems, Impreases, strange trickes, and devises, between the Ape and the Owle, the like was never yet seene in Paris-garden.7 As applied by Edwards to ‘masquing’, that is, to performing varied roles while wearing a disguise or stage costume, the word ‘deafly’ seems to allude to ‘Adon’/Shakespeare as a skilled and versatile member of a playing company, or ‘stately troupe’. He is one who delivers ‘rich conceited’ speeches, and/or perhaps takes

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Fig. 2. Drawing by Ralph Brooke, York Herald, of coat of arms for ‘Shakespeare ye player’ (1602).

part in plays that are as a whole ‘rich conceited’, that is, powerfully imagined or wittily written. Edwards’s lines are entirely consistent with the Groatsworth account of Shakespeare as a ‘Johannes fac totum’ of the stage, the difference being that while Edwards praises him highly for being at once a skilful stage player and a fluent poet, ‘Greene’/Chettle (see below) scorns him for exactly the same reason. Shakespeare qua actor was to be the object of further scorn some years later. In 1602 he was observed by Ralph Brooke, York Herald, to claim the status of an armigerous gentleman despite being a mere ‘player’.8 Brooke’s sketch of the Shakespeare crest, showing a rather scraggy falcon with droopy wings, rather than with its wings splendidly ‘displayed’ as described in the draft patent, may also suggest contempt. In addition to associating

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Shakespeare with an unrespectable profession, Brooke claimed that he was only ‘playing’ the part of a gentleman, having procured a questionable grant of arms from Garter King of Arms, William Dethick.9 It may also be significant that Brooke’s drawing belongs to the year 1602, that is, just after the death of John Shakespeare (d. 1601), to whom the grant had been made in 1596. William could now claim gentle status in the time-honoured way as the first-born son of a legally recognized armigerous gentleman, now defunct. Being a player undoubtedly carried a stigma both in the Elizabethan period and beyond. A celebrated Act of the Privy Council in 1574 categorized players who were not members of a securely licensed company as rogues and vagabonds. In 1580 the author of A third blast of retraite from plaies and theatres (possibly Anthony Munday, later a prolific playwright) compared ‘plaiers in these daies which exhibit their games for lucres sake’ to ‘droanes, which wil not labor to bring in, but live of the labors of the paineful gatherers. They are therefore to be thrust out of the Bee-hive of a Christian Common-weale.’10 The professional and legal status of players was unusual and equivocal. Players who lacked the patronage either of a nobleman or of some eminent and wealthy gentleman were at risk of being driven from parish to parish as ‘rogues’, being given no opportunity to earn money from performance. A satirical account of the wretched plight of some companies so desperate for patronage that they would accept it even from the devil himself occurs in Dekker’s Newes from Hell (1606), a sequel to Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse.11 Mercury helps the ferryman Charon to make up his financial accounts for the carriage of various individuals to Hell: Item, lent to a companie of country players, being nine in number, one sharer, & the rest Jornymen, that with strowling were brought to deaths door, xiiid.ob.12 upon their stocke of apparell, to pay for their boat hire, because they would trie if they could be suffred to play in the divels name.13

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Yet those companies which were fortunate enough to enjoy eminent patronage had access both to considerable wealth (from fees at the door) and to powerful protection. Members of such companies could even on occasion get away with murder, as in the case of the Queen’s Man John Towne, who gave a fatal wound in the neck to the company’s leading player, William Knell, in a scuffle between the two players on 13 June 1587. Only three months later Towne received a pardon from the Queen.14 As E.K. Chambers has pointed out, companies of players were not cooperative mutual societies, like guilds of craftsmen or merchants. Playing companies were essentially feudal in character, for the relationship of players to their patron ‘had a mediaeval element, by which the derivation of playing from minstrelsy is strongly recalled.’15 Licensed players who enjoyed royal or noble patronage were categorized as high-ranking household servants. Companies under the direct patronage of the monarch, such as the Queen’s Men, a company to which I believe Shakespeare at one time belonged, enjoyed the status of Grooms of her Chamber. As Philip Henslowe’s so-called Diary shows, takings at the public theatres could be very substantial, so those players who qualified for a share of the takings, or even a half-share, could do extremely well out of successful performances. It is not surprising, therefore, if, during Shakespeare’s early career, those players who managed to secure eminent patronage provoked intense jealousy among non-performing playwrights and poets, who were unlikely ever to achieve a comparable level of privilege and reward. The dying Greene’s (supposed) warning to his university-educated friends to beware of being ‘subject to the pleasure of such rude groomes’ appears to be a dig at the ‘rude’ or lowly origins of many of the Queen’s Men, individuals undeservedly, in his view, elevated to membership of the royal household. Technically they were ‘grooms of the chamber’, according to OED’s sense 4, in which ‘groom’ was the designation of ‘several officers of the English Royal Household, chiefly members of the Lord Chamberlain’s department’; however, the epithet ‘rude’ suggests OED’s sense 3 definition of ‘groom’ as ‘A man of inferior

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position’. From the ventriloquized mouth of Robert Greene, a university graduate and therefore a gentleman, such abuse is natural. What is much more surprising is the extent to which prejudice against the acting profession has persisted into modern times, having a continued impact on contemporary perceptions of Shakespeare’s professional career. Even today it is commonplace for academic scholars to dismiss or sideline Shakespeare’s activities as an actor, despite many records that indicate that these both preceded his career as a playwright, and continued in tandem with it. The continuation of Shakespeare’s acting career was twice testified publicly by Jonson, a man not always inclined to give credit where credit was due. The 1616 Folio text of his Every Man In his Humour places Shakespeare in the prime position, top left, in the appended list of ‘The principall Comeoedians’, opposite Burbage, when the play was first performed in 1598; and the Folio text of Sejanus his Fall lists ‘WILL SHAKE-SPEARE’, this time top right, facing Burbage top left, as a ‘principall Tragoedian’ in 1603.16 Even more powerful is the testimony included in the posthumous First Folio of Shakespeare’s own plays, in which the list of ‘The Names of the Principall Actors, in all these Playes’ is headed by that of William Shakespeare, top left. The phrase ‘in all these Playes’ may, I think, imply that he had been a leading performer in every single play included in the Folio, including some of which, as we now know, he was not sole author, such as Timon of Athens and Henry VIII. Two illustrations of how Shakespeare’s acting career continues to be dismissed or minimized are offered by comments by Professor Peter Holland, author of the ODNB account of Shakespeare’s life. On 28 October 2005 Holland reviewed Peter Ackroyd’s massive Shakespeare: The Biography in the Times Literary Supplement.17 Among various unsatisfactory ‘threads running through’ the book, Holland describes, and dismisses, Ackroyd’s fanciful and speculative account of Shakespeare as ‘fundamentally an experienced actor, someone whose metamorphic abilities as a writer . . . are a direct consequence of the transformative power that an actor understands’. For according to Holland, ‘the evidence for Shake-

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speare’s abilities is distinctly limited’. He dismisses Aubrey’s statement that he ‘was an Actor at one of the Play-houses and did act exceedingly well’,18 even though this was based on his discussions with the elderly actor William Beeston, whose father Christopher, a longstanding member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, had acted alongside Shakespeare in Jonson’s Every Man In his Humour (1598), and presumably in many other plays in the years during which they were colleagues.19 Instead, Holland invokes two later traditions. Nicholas Rowe suggested that Shakespeare’s performances may have been restricted to secondary ‘old man’ roles, such as that of the Ghost in Hamlet; and William Oldys linked him with the role of old Adam in As You Like It.20 In his ODNB article Holland claims that ‘Neither at this period nor later is there any firm evidence . . . of the quality of his perfor mances’. Accordingly, Shakespeare is classified in ODNB only as ‘playwright and poet’, and not, as would surely be more correct, as ‘actor, playwright and poet’.21 While I, too, find some of Ackroyd’s detailed comments on Shakespeare’s performance of specific roles rather fanciful, I have no quarrel either with the broad claim he makes for the range and skill of his acting career, or with his presumption that he performed major roles. I believe that there is earlier and stronger support for such presumptions than we would guess from the ODNB account. It appears to have been widely ignored or sidelined, perhaps because of widespread reluctance to believe that a single individual could be at once an outstanding poet and playwright and an outstanding and versatile actor, in addition to continuing generic prejudice against actors on the part of many scholars. A seventeenth-century annotation recently discussed by Paul H. Altrocchi and Professor Alan H. Nelson suggests that Shakespeare’s prominence as an actor was both remembered and highly esteemed in the next generation. One Richard Hunt, a clergyman’s son and a graduate of Oriel College, Oxford, wrote a marginal note in his copy of William Camden’s Britannia (1590 edition). Alongside Camden’s tribute to the two major worthies of Stratford-upon-Avon, John of Stratford who built its parish

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church and Hugh Clopton, who built its great bridge across the Avon, Hunt has added the words ‘et Gulielmo Shakespear Roscio plane nostro’, ‘and [honour is also due] to William Shakespeare, manifestly our Roscius’.22 Roscius was, of course, the most celebrated actor in ancient Rome, and was honoured by the state.23 In context, in his tribute to her two worthies Camden had described Stratford as a small market town, especially to be honoured for the sake of these two great benefactors. It is possible, therefore, that Hunt’s addition of Shakespeare as its third ‘worthy’ suggests that his fame contributed to the town’s mercantile success, in which case literary pilgrimages may have begun much earlier than we thought. Hunt was born in Gloucestershire about 1596, matriculating in Oxford on 4 December 1612 aged 16. It is just conceivable, therefore, that he had seen Shakespeare perform on the stage near the end of the poet’s life. It was while young men were students, whether at the universities or the Inns of Court, that they tended to be most active in attending the playhouses. As we shall see from the account of Henry Peacham in the next chapter, some men recalled their theatrical experiences vividly many years later. From 1621 Hunt was Vicar of Bishops Itchington, in Warwickshire, and he describes himself as such in an inscription on the title-page. But whether he acquired the book – of which he was not the first owner – before or after that date is not clear: the title-page inscription could be a later addition. Whether he was drawing on his own recollections or on local tradition in Warwickshire, what is noteworthy is that such a welleducated and respectable individual as this Warwickshire clergyman believed that Shakespeare’s distinction as an actor deserved to be mentioned in Camden’s learned account of Britain’s cultural heritage. According to Peter Holland, ‘there is no direct report’ of Shakespeare’s acting skills by a contemporary. It is true that we lack the kinds of detailed documentation that we would dearly love to have, such as a full catalogue of the parts he played, both in his own plays and those of other writers. There are also many further questions to which we would like answers. Could he put

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on different voices? Did he speak, sometimes or always, with a Warwickshire accent? How well did he handle soliloquy, dialogue and direct address to the audience? Was his creative fluency such that he could ad-lib effectively if he forgot the correct lines? What did he look like in costume? Did he ever play a woman’s part? Was he always immediately recognizable, or was he one of those chameleon-like actors who appear utterly different in different roles? None of these questions can be addressed except with pure speculation. But it is worth bearing in mind that our knowledge of the specific talents and acting style of Shakespeare’s close friend and colleague Richard Burbage, unquestionably the most admired actor of his generation, is almost equally meagre. Testimony from contemporaries who saw Shakespeare perform that they were impressed by his skill is, as we have seen in the example of Thomas Edwards, both early and cogent. From 1594 onwards repeated couplings of Shakespeare’s name with that of Burbage also indicate that both men were now acknowledged to be leading performers. John Davies of Hereford’s allusions to Burbage and Shakespeare as two stage-players whom he greatly admires, soon after the accession of James I, will be discussed in Chapter 3. Both of the most telling early allusions to Shakespeare as a player derive from Henry Chettle. John Jowett has conclusively demonstrated that Chettle was the true author of the epistle ‘To those Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance’ included in Greenes Groatsworth of witte, and published in the autumn of 1592.24 This celebrated document attributed to the dying Robert Greene culminates in an attack on Shakespeare which appears as the conclusive example in a broader onslaught on players, ‘those Puppets . . . that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours’. As posthumously ventriloquized by Chettle, the dying ‘Greene’ warns his old acquaintances Marlowe, Nashe and Peele, to beware especially of the ingratitude of ‘those Puppets’. He urges them neither to write for the players in future nor to regard them as friends. But it is precisely because their acting is effective, not because it is weak or inadequate, that they are made the victims of ‘Greene’s’ envious scorn. Speaking splendid lines

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composed by alumni of the two universities, some of these ‘Puppets’ have of late become considerably more powerful and widely admired than the poets ‘to whom they all have been beholding’. The passage as a whole echoes passages in Nashe’s 1589 preface to Greene’s romance Menaphon. Nashe, too, had attacked the arrogance of recently arrived rivals to Greene, together with the pitiful lack of learning of some writers who are currently attempting to compose ‘Senecan’ tragedy.25 Nashe may also have incorporated an attack on Shakespeare as a pushy player/poet and ‘kill-cow’.26 The following sentence in Groatsworth develops the theme of ingratitude further: Is it not strange, that I, to whom they have all beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all have been beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken? The supposed speaker here is Robert Greene, in dire poverty and very close to death in a garret at Mistress Isham’s humble abode in Dowgate, in the City of London. Using ‘both’ where we would now use ‘all’, ‘Greene’ addresses the three scholar-playwrights Marlowe, Nashe and Peele. But even though ‘Puppets’ and ‘Anticks’ have been alluded to in the plural as ‘they all’, just one individual, the ‘upstart Crow’, is singled out by ‘Greene’ for specific and detailed attack. ‘Greene’ suggests that this pushy and ungrateful player has performed leading roles in plays penned by, first, the dying Greene; second, the living, but deplorably atheist, Marlowe; thirdly, the bitterly satirical Nashe; and fourthly, the lovable but poverty-stricken Peele. It is in this sense that the upstart is ‘beholding’ to all four. He has accrued money and fame by speaking ‘from our mouths’, that is, by delivering lines and speeches written by these four scholar-playwrights. However, he has done nothing whatsoever for the dying playwright Greene, to whom he owes so much, and therefore he cannot be trusted to offer any succour to the three survivors if and when they, too, find

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themselves ‘in that case’ – that is, in dire poverty and sick unto death. As ‘Greene’ (Chettle) continues: Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart 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: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. This is the passage which has received most attention from scholars eager for an early allusion to Shakespeare as a writer, which is indeed present in the scathing comment on the Crow’s arrogant belief that he can ‘bombast out a blanke verse’, exemplified in the adapted quotation of one of his lines which has been altered to furnish both an illustration of his writing and an unflattering portrait of the aspirant poet.27 But we should note that the phrase ‘bombast out’ could conceivably allude to Shakespeare adding extemporized blank verse lines to a part in performance, rather than to his having composed such lines in advance for himself or others to deliver, especially since ‘bombast’, stuffing or padding, suggests addition or inflation. If the pushy player did improve and expand lines that he delivered in plays originally composed by Greene and his friends, that would be sure to annoy the original poets – and all the more so if these turned out to be the lines to which audiences responded most strongly. There may also be some suggestion that ‘Shake-scene’ himself had delivered the line adapted – ‘O, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’ (3H6 1.4.137). In this case he performed the powerful tragic role of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, whose claim to the throne is as strong as that of Henry VI. As John Dover Wilson showed as long ago as 1951, the ‘upstart Crow’ image derives from Greene’s own authentic writings. In Francesco’s Fortunes (1590) Greene blended a story from Macrobius about an ambitious crow being taught to say ‘Ave Caesar’ with an image from Horace’s Epistles 1.3. This epistle concerns poetic style. A derivative poet called Celsus is warned by Horace

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‘not to pilfer from other writers any longer, lest those he has robbed should return one day to claim their feathers, when like the crow . . . stripped of its stolen splendour . . . he would become a laughing-stock’.28 The notion of the crow as an especially arrogant bird, though inherently lowly, is vividly expressed in the contemporary proverb ‘He struts like a Crow in a gutter’.29 As a bird that notoriously feeds on carrion the crow would also have ominous associations in proximity to a death-bed. The image of ‘our feathers’ is explicitly theatrical. It is clear that actors were especially characterized by the splendid plumes that they wore on their hats or helmets (cf. Ham 3.2.267). Only a few weeks before he was killed by Ben Jonson, another well-protected player who got away with murder, the actor Gabriel Spencer borrowed the large sum of ten shillings from Philip Henslowe in order to purchase ‘a plume of feathers’, presumably to enhance the figure that he cut on the stage.30 Finally, a ‘Johannes fac totum’ who is also a ‘Shakescene’ would appear to be a theatrical odd-job man or jack of all trades, who ‘in his owne conceit’ believes that he excels in every aspect of theatrical performance. But he could also be something much worse. In a short note that has been widely overlooked – it is not mentioned in any of the most recent editions of 2 Henry VI – D. Allen Carroll pointed out that the rebel Jack Cade was known to chroniclers either as ‘John Mend-all or John Amend-all’: Presumably the name was applied to Cade out of contempt, or else, as Ralph A. Griffiths suggests, it was taken on by him as ‘an expressive nickname that indicated his intentions in a clear and simple way that might serve as an effective rallying-cry’.31 He suspects that the author of the epistle here, too, employed against Shakespeare his own creation, that preposterous ignoramus who is Cade . . . Those Cade scenes certainly were distinctive and provocative, and they were probably both the main attraction of the play and Shakespeare’s first assured success on the stage.

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Chettle seems, then, to allude to two of Shakespeare’s most recent plays, those now known as 2 and 3 Henry VI. In each case he associated the writer himself with an exceptionally ruthless and ambitious character who posed a severe threat to the commonwealth. One is the tiger-hearted Margaret of Anjou, ‘shewolf of France’, the other the sturdy Kentish rebel Jack Cade who successfully recruited ‘solid members of village society – the lesser gentry, yeomen, and husbandmen’ – in revolt against the King.32 As viewed by his rivals, ‘Shake-scene’ was perhaps not just a pushy player, but a potential enemy of the state. The ‘scene’ element in ‘Shake-scene’, though a decade earlier than OED’s earliest example, appears to refer to the wooden platform stage (OED ‘scene’ n. I.1). ‘Shake’ alludes both to the upstart’s true name and to the physical vigour with which he strides, struts and stamps on such public platforms. Jonson seems to have been recalling this passage, but appropriating it for the purposes of eulogy, in his poem ‘To the memory of my beloved, The AUTHOR’, when he imagines summoning up the spirits of the great Greek and Roman poets ‘to heare thy Buskin tread, / And shake a stage’. Here, too, there is a strong implication that Shakespeare performed in tragedies as well as composing them. We should also attend to the way in which the passage beginning ‘Yes, trust them not . . . ’ follows on from what went before. Players, it is claimed, are fair-weather friends: ‘unto none of you (like mee) sought those burres to cleave: those Puppets (I meane) . . . ’ Players, and one player in particular, hung around Greene while he was a successful playwright. At the height of his popularity Greene had even succeeded in selling the same play, for the high price of twenty nobles, to two different playing companies simultaneously.33 J. Dover Wilson suggested that this bit of sharp practice may have been ‘the final cause of [Greene’s] ruin’.34 But when the once thriving Greene was at the point of death the pushy player who formerly clung to him was nowhere to be seen. This is why Shakespeare gets an adapted version of one of his best lines thrown back in his face. Like Margaret of Anjou, the pitiless ‘she-wolf of France’ (3H6 1.4.111), who

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caused York’s young son to be stabbed to death, he has proved to be tiger-hearted. But while Margaret looked as if she ought to have been compassionate, because she was in appearance a woman, Shakespeare’s cruel heart is ‘wrapt in a Players hyde’. This is much less hypocritical, since players, unlike women, were not generally expected to be tender-hearted. As D. Allen Carroll has pointed out, the allegation that Shakespeare the player is pitiless and unfeeling may well be generic rather than based on any specific observation of his offstage behaviour. For instance, William Rankins, in his fierce anti-theatrical satire The Mirror of Monsters (1587), had said of stage players ‘More unnaturall are they than the Tygre’, and ‘They will doo no good to none of their benefactors’. All that Chettle needed to know, in order to pen this passage, was that, true to type as a stage-player, Shakespeare had failed to succour his old friend and master Robert Greene. It has been widely assumed that Shakespeare’s greatest offence against Greene and his fellow poets was that he ‘supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you’. But the reason why this is so particularly intolerable is because he is, in origin, a mere vagabond player, a ‘Shake-scene’ or treader of the boards. Greene, Marlowe, Nashe and Peele were all technically scholars, University-educated men, even though the three survivors are currently driven to ‘spend their wits in making plaies’. None of the four appears ever to have performed on a public stage. Nor did a fifth friend of Greene’s, Thomas Watson, the most scholarly of them all, who may be alluded to as Marlowe’s very recently deceased ‘brocher of . . . Atheisme’.35 The do-it-all Shake-scene has done them all a double injury. Not only has this uneducated upstart failed to show any gratitude to the scholar poets for having written blank-verse speeches that he has delivered publicly to great acclaim, the ungrateful wretch has also contrived to get paid extra by presuming to write his own ‘blanke verse’. As a familiar proverb, later cited by Shakespeare himself, had it, ‘Ingratitude comprehends [is the worst of] all faults [vices]’.36 Unless we understand that the assault here is above all against Shakespeare as a player, who allegedly owed much of his popular

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success on the stage to Greene, yet never came near him when he was penniless and dying, we shall not fully understand the nature of Chettle’s apology a few weeks later. His Kind-Harts Dreame was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8 December 1592, less than three months after the defensive entry of Groatsworth, a work that both Chettle and his fellow Stationers seem rightly to have anticipated would cause trouble.37 A different section of Groatsworth, ‘Lamilias Fable’, construed either as an attack on Lord Burghley or, less probably, on the ‘traitor’ Sir John Perrott, may perhaps have been the item that caused the printer, John Danter, and the editor/writer, Chettle, to be summoned before the Stationers’ Court on 5 March 1593.38 But it is clear from Chettle’s epistle prefaced to Kind-Harts Dreame that Groatsworth had also provoked immediate protests both from Marlowe, who had been admonished to mend his atheist ways lest he die suddenly and go to hell, and from Shakespeare, who had been characterized as a cold-hearted and self-regarding upstart who has the temerity to believe that he can write as well as act. Whether there is also an implication that Shakespeare is a plagiarist is not absolutely clear. The primary suggestion, I think, is that he owes his great success to the poets whose lines he has performed (and possibly improved), rather than that he has stolen such lines and passed them off as his own compositions. There may also be a suggestion that ‘Shake-scene’ has co-authored plays, and that the passages written by him proved to be the most popular with audiences. Despite all this success, with its concomitant financial rewards, he failed to offer any support to the indigent and dying Greene. Authorship of the offending epistle was speedily denied by Nashe in the second edition of his Pierce Penilesse, probably as early as mid-October 1592. In a newly penned epistle to the printer he declared that a scald trivial lying pamphlet, cald Greens groats-worth of wit, is given out to be of my doing. God never have care of my soule, but utterly renounce me, if the least word

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or sillable in it proceeded from my pen, or if I were any way privie to the writing or printing of it.39 Nashe’s vehement public denial of authorship, in a book that was extremely popular, left Chettle uncomfortably exposed as the prime suspect. It was never very plausible that Greene on his death-bed should have penned such an epistle, bitter though he may have felt when his life and career were drawing to their close. Accordingly, in the epistle ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’ prefaced to Kind-Harts Dreame, Chettle denies that either Marlowe or Shakespeare had been personally known to him at the time when – as he alleged – he transformed Greene’s last writings into legible printer’s copy.40 His claim that ‘Greene’s hand was none of the best’ allowed him some useful leeway for occasional deviations from his supposed manuscript originals. Chettle continues to be unacquainted with Marlowe, and says that he is more than happy to keep it that way. But Shakespeare has turned out to have powerful friends and admirers. According to Chettle, ‘divers of worship have reported, his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writting, that approoves41 his Art.’ While rather over-emphatically continuing to deny his own responsibility for that offensive ‘letter written to divers playmakers’, Chettle claims that with reference to Shakespeare he is now ‘as sory, as if the originall fault had been my fault’. For subsequent to his editorial labours on Groatsworth, he says, ‘my selfe have seene his demeanour no lesse civill than he excellent in the qualitie he professes’. Not enough attention has been given to Chettle’s use here of the word ‘qualitie’. In OED’s sense 5a, now obsolete, ‘quality’ alludes to a ‘Profession, occupation, business, esp. that of an actor’. E.K. Chambers was fully aware of this, presenting his discussion of the Elizabethan acting profession under the heading ‘The Actor’s Quality’.42 This is clearly the application intended by Chettle in his allusion to ‘the qualitie he professes’. At the time when he allegedly tidied up Greene’s posthumous fragments, ‘With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted’. However, since the publication of Groatsworth

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he has both ‘seene’ the second complainant’s polite ‘demeanor’, and has witnessed his excellence ‘in the qualitie he professes’, that is, as an actor. Whether or not Chettle has got to know Shakespeare as a personal friend, it appears that he has recently had an opportunity both to see and to hear him, for the first time, performing in a play. If – this time, at least – Chettle was being wholly honest, it would seem that he had not himself heard Shakespeare, as Richard, Duke of York, deliver the line ‘O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’. Either a different player had performed this role, or else Chettle had heard the line quoted by someone else – perhaps Robert Greene – who had himself heard it delivered by ‘Shake-scene’. Chettle has now learned from ‘divers of worship’ – presumably Shakespeare’s current patrons – about his ‘uprightness of dealing’, as well his ‘facetious grace in writting’. However, this testimony is problematic. Because of worsening plague in London the public theatres had been under a restraining order from 23 June 1592. According to Henslowe’s records, playing was briefly resumed from 29 December 1592 until 1 February 1593.43 But this is too late for Chettle, whose KindHarts Dreame was completed by 8 December 1592. So how, when and where could Chettle have had an opportunity to witness Shakespeare’s excellence ‘in the qualitie he professes’? There is a single thought-provoking possibility, never, I think, previously suggested. It has the potential to illuminate the careers and mutual relationships of Nashe and Greene, as well as Shakespeare’s career as a player. Though London’s public theatres were closed, private theatrical entertainments continued in private locations seven or more miles from the City of London. One such, Summers last will and testament, appears to have taken place at Archbishop Whitgift’s out-of-town residence, Croydon Palace, in the late summer or early autumn of 1592. It has been widely claimed that the Queen was present at this performance.44 But the extravagant compliments to her with which the piece closes were commonplace in plays of the period, and Whitgift, a Privy Councillor and one of her best-loved courtiers, would surely have insisted on them. Because of worsening plague,

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Elizabeth retreated to Hampton Court in early October, the last stopping place of her summer’s progress being East Bedfont, only a few miles away. Yet the play had presumably been planned, as so many were each summer, in the fervent hope that she would grace it with her presence. Such a splendid show as Summers last will, with a wide variety of characters, costumes, music and dancing, must have taken a good many weeks to compose and rehearse, and no one could possibly know in advance that the current plague outbreak in the City of London would get worse rather than better in the course of September. The Queen often did visit Whitgift in his Palace at Croydon. Whitgift’s earliest biographer, who had been the Controller of his household, provides detailed testimony: Every yeere hee entertained the Queene at one of his houses, so long as he was Archbishop: and some yeeres twice or thrice, where all things were performed in so seemely an order, that shee went thence always exceedingly well pleased. And beside many publique, and gracious favours done unto him, she would salute him, and bid him farewell by the name of blacke husband; calling also his men her servants, as a token of her good contentment with their attendance and paines.45 Though Elizabeth did not manage to get to Croydon in the autumn of 1592, she certainly did so six months later, for meetings of the Privy Council took place ‘At the Court at Croyden’ on 6, 13 and 14 May 1593.46 This also indicates that Croydon was regarded as a sufficiently salubrious location for the Queen and her court in plague times, since at this date the plague in London had diminished, but not ceased. It is also worth noting that on 6 May Lord Strange’s Men were licensed to perform in anie other cities, townes and corporacions where the infection is not, so it be not within seaven miles of London or the Coort, that they may be in the better readiness hereafter for her Majesty’s service whensoever they shalbe thereunto called.47

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Normally ‘Court’ was wherever the monarch was currently resident. Yet despite the apparent exclusion of ‘Coort’, the final clause of this licence suggests that it was above all for the Queen’s pleasure that Strange’s Men were licensed to perform outside London, and the date suggests that this company may well have been in attendance at Croydon between 6 and 15 May. Summers last will and testament was not printed until 1600, having been apparently prepared for the press, and somewhat revised, by Nashe himself. But it seems almost certain that Nashe died, or at least became terminally ill, while it was at press.48 The complete absence of an ‘A’ gathering or of any preliminary, dedicatory or commendatory material is very unusual. Nashe habitually devoted much energy and ingenuity to such preliminaries. His penultimate publication, Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599), is prefaced both with an ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ ‘To his worthie good patron, Lustie Humfrey’ and an address ‘To his Readers, hee cares not what they be’. Together, these occupy the whole of the book’s ‘A’ gathering. If Nashe had been able to furnish such preliminaries to Summers last will we might have had the benefit of some much-needed information about the play’s earlier history. However, it is extremely probable that Greene collaborated with Nashe on the composition of the play in its early stages, for in the epistle to the gentleman playwrights in Groatsworth ‘R.G.’ addresses Nashe as ‘yong Juvenall, that byting Satyrist, that lastly [i.e., most recently] with mee together writ a Comedie’. Hitherto, this comedy written by Nashe and Greene has not been identified. But Summers last will seems to be the obvious candidate both because of the likely time of its composition, during what proved to be the last summer of Greene’s life; and because its English setting and old-fashioned medley style, which alternates prose with verse and songs with set speeches, strongly resemble Greene’s attested work for the stage. It is true that the title-page of the 1600 text describes the play as ‘Written by Thomas Nash’. But given that this text had been revised by Nashe, and that eight years had now elapsed since its original composition, the omission of a quondam collaborator’s

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name would not be surprising, though it is also true that the additional name of Robert Greene might have been considered a selling point. But if Nashe became ill, and perhaps even died, while the book was at press, the title-page, normally the last part of a text to be composed, may have been put together after his death by a publisher (Simon Stafford) who was unaware of the presence of another hand in the play’s first version. If Summers last will was indeed the comedy on which Greene and Nashe worked ‘together’ during the final weeks of Greene’s life before he was ‘visited’ by sickness, some of its definite connections with Greene would be explained. For instance, a prose version of Orion’s extended eulogy of dogs in the play appeared in Samuel Rowlands’s Greenes Ghost Haunting Conie Catchers (1602).49 Rowlands, a close watcher of the literary scene, may have been well-informed in attributing this encomiastic tour de force, originally derived from Sextus Empiricus, to Greene rather than to Nashe. In Have with you to Saffron-walden (1596), responding to an allegation by Gabriel Harvey that he imitated Greene, Nashe alluded to Greene as ‘subscribing [= writing in an inferior manner] to me in any thing but plotting Plaies, wherein he was his crafts master’.50 This would be consistent with Greene’s having worked on Summers last will at the earliest stage of its conception, devising its ‘plot’ or overall scenario, and sketching out a few scenes or speeches, in July/August 1592, before he became ill, whether as a consequence of consuming pickled herrings, or infection by plague, or both. Incidentally, this theory suggests that the much-mythologized banquet of rhenish wine and pickled herrings consumed by Nashe, Greene and others about a month before the latter’s death may have taken place in or near Croydon, rather than in the City of London. And whether the meal took place in Croydon or in London, the assembled company may have consisted of all of those who were most concerned with the preparation of Whitgift’s comedy. Nashe’s editor R.B. McKerrow claimed that Whitgift would not have ‘risked infecting his household with plague by entertaining actors from London at such a time’.51 Nevertheless, he

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argued that the comic actor called ‘Toy’ who played the key role of the jester Will Summers was a professional player; and in his opening Prologue ‘Will Summers’ explicitly alludes to the ‘rogue’, or ‘vagabond’, status of all the other performers, which suggests that they too are members of playing companies now broken up, for the time being patronless and scattered because of the closure of the public theatres. In the same passage Summers/Toy also instructs them not to cough or spit anywhere near the courtly spectators, which to me suggests that many of them may indeed have recently arrived from the plague-ridden City: ‘Actors, you Rogues, come away, cleare your throats, blowe your noses, and wype your mouthes ere you enter, that you may take no occasion to spit or to cough, when you are non plus.’52 Whitgift kept a very large retinue, and was eulogized for this after his death. Thomas Churchyard, for instance, said that he Held liberall house, and kept a Lordly trayne, Fed rich and poore, with all God sent and gave, Hoorded not up, nor lov’d no greedy gayne, Knew that all we, shall carry nought to grave.53 And according to Sir George Paule, ‘He had a desire alwayes to keepe a great and bountifull house . . . at Christmasse, especially, his gates were alwayes open, and his Hall set twice or thrice over with strangers.’54 When he travelled to Canterbury his train included ‘fortie Gentlemen in chaines of gold’, followed by more than five hundred clergymen and gentlemen on horseback.55 However, he does not appear to have had his own company of players, though he probably retained a number of musicians. Perhaps the cast for Summers last will had been opportunistically gathered together from such currently dispersed companies as the Queen’s Men, Strange’s Men and the Children of the Queen’s Chapel for what was evidently planned as a spectacular entertainment closely attuned to the Queen’s own rather old-fashioned tastes. Some of these performers may, like Nashe, have been appointed as temporary members of Whitgift’s retinue. Nashe had taken up the cudgels on behalf of Whitgift in the complicated

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theological pamphlet war known as the Marprelate dispute from 1589, and was certainly one of his retainers for a while. The embittered Hebrew scholar Hugh Broughton complained, in a long letter to Whitgift, of ‘how his Nash gentleman scoffed my Ebrew studies’.56 The performers seem also to have included a company of morris-dancers from Whitgift’s previous diocese of Worcester, judging by the speech early on in which Summers exclaims: Now for the credit of Wostershire. The finest set of Morris-dauncers that is between this and Stretham: mary, me thinks there is one of them daunceth like a Clothyers horse, with a wool-pack on his backe. You, friend with the Hobby-horse, goe not too fast, for feare of wearing out my Lords tyle-stones with your hobnayles.57 The selection of Henry VIII’s favourite jester, Will Summers, as central narrator and cynical commentator on each episode reflects the writers’ close attention to the Queen’s own personal interests. If Shakespeare acted in Summers last will the likeliest role for him would be that of ‘Summer’, as distinct from the jesting ‘Will Summers’. This is an ‘old man’ role, and as such consistent with the testimony of Rowe and Oldys, mentioned above, that Shakespeare’s speciality was old men. The central narrative situation is that Summer is dying, and trying to decide to whom to bequeath his great riches. Autumn and Winter, who support Summer on his first entrance, seem to have been performed by children, given Will Summers’s characteristically cynical comment on them as ‘A couple of pratty boyes, if they would wash their faces’. But in contrast to the jester Will Summers, who speaks in prose throughout, the dignified, but dying, Summer speaks entirely in blank verse. His part includes some extremely lengthy speeches, one of forty-nine lines (1822–71), and another of sixty-five (1142–1207). Mastery of these would probably be beyond the reach of even the most talented of the children, and would pose a considerable challenge to many adult actors. But I think we can

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confidently attribute an exceptional gift for verbal memorization to William Shakespeare, at this point aged twenty-nine and at the height of his powers. As J.J.M. Tobin, that great gatherer of verbal links between Shakespeare and Nashe, has observed, ‘Shakespeare certainly knew his Bible, but he knew his Nashe fully as well.’58 In addition to many examples assembled by Tobin, there is a further link with Julius Caesar. Summers’s remark that ‘This same Harry Baker is such a necessary fellow to go on arrants, as you shall not finde in a country’ (1567–9) appears to be echoed in Antony’s dismissive comment on Lepidus as ‘ a slight unmeritable man, / Meet to be sent on errands’ (4.1.12–13). Incidentally, the phrase ‘in a country’ – suggesting ‘anywhere in the world’ – may be picked up by Nashe from the celebrated phrase in Groatsworth about the ‘upstart Crow’ who believes himself to be ‘the onely Shake-scene in a countrey’, quoted above. The occurrence of echoes of Summers last will in works undoubtedly written before the play’s appearance in print in 1600 suggests that Shakespeare was already closely familiar with this text, presumably from performance. For instance, the phrase ‘Trip and goe’ (212) is echoed in Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.2.138). Henry Woudhuysen has also suggested that the songs of ‘Ver’ and ‘Hiems’ that close the play could echo the song of ‘Ver’ in Summers last will.59 Will Summers’s rhetorical question, as a prelude to merry revelry, ‘What have we to doe with scales and hower-glasses, except we were Bakers or Clocke-keepers?’ (425–6), seems to be echoed in Prince Hal’s speech about the irrelevance of clocks to those wholly dedicated to drinking and revelry (1H4 1.2.5–11). Harvest’s remark, ‘why, friend, I am no tapster to say Anon, anon sir’ (822–3), may have fed into Shakespeare’s repeated uses of this tapster’s catchphrase both in Venus and Adonis and in 1 and 2 Henry IV. A further connection could go the other way, with Shakespeare as an influence on Nashe, if we are convinced by E.A.J. Honigmann’s suggestion that 1 Henry VI was written as early as 1589. However, I rather doubt this. It seems more likely, in the light of recent authorial

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analysis, that the writer here was Nashe himself, one of three or more co-authors of a history play put together in some haste as a ‘prequel’ to the two now known as 2 and 3 Henry VI.60 In the supplementary notes that he added to McKerrow’s edition of Nashe, F.P. Wilson drew attention, with extreme distaste, to the resemblance of Summer’s image (lines 1782–3) – Not raging Haecuba, whose hollow eyes Gave sucke to fiftie sorrowes at one time – to 1 Henry VI (1.1.49), ‘When at their mothers’ moistened eyes babes shall suck’. Like F.P. Wilson, Brian Vickers dislikes the image, but he argues cogently that rather than being a case of Shakespeare echoing Nashe, this is a case of a scene – one of several in the play – that was written by Nashe himself.61 If Shakespeare played a leading role in Summers last will, and if Chettle saw the play performed at Croydon Palace in the early autumn of 1592, then the ‘persons of worship’ from whom he learned about Shakespeare’s ‘uprightness of dealing’ and ‘facetious grace in writting’ may have included some of the Archbishop’s distinguished house guests, and possibly even the Archbishop himself. The occasional presence of Chettle in Whitgift’s household would not be at all unlikely. Whitgift took a close interest in the affairs of the Stationers’ Company, and Chettle was at this time one of the Company’s leading members. For instance, at some time in 1587–8 Henry Chettle was paid six shillings to travel to Cambridge about the company’s business.62 Shakespeare’s path had already crossed that of Whitgift nearly a decade earlier, but in a manner that is unlikely to have made any great impression on the prelate, though it was extremely momentous for the future player-poet. In November 1582 Whitgift was Bishop of Worcester, a diocese that then included some parts of Warwickshire, including Stratford-upon-Avon. It was his deputies who provided a special licence for the marriage, after a single calling of banns rather than the usual three, ‘of William Shagspere’ to ‘Anne hathwey of Stratford in the Dioces of worcester maiden’. I am not sure whether Whitgift always presided in

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person over his Consistory Court, but it seems likely that he often did, and that his signature would normally be required on the licence. Unfortunately the licence proper does not survive, only the marriage licence bond and a brief entry in the diocesan register. But eleven years later, in April 1593, Whitgift’s authority was once again important to Shakespeare, and this time he undoubtedly did sign his name in person. For posterity this transaction is even more significant than that of Shakespeare’s marriage. A manuscript of Venus and Adonis was licensed for publication by Richard Field, who, like Shakespeare, had grown up in Stratford. The text was entered ‘under thandes of the Archbisshop of canterbury’ on 18 April 1593. This was the period in which ‘Whitgift’s whelps’ were zealously hunting down the presumed writers and printers of the libellous ‘Marprelate’ tracts, and Whitgift himself was micro-managing the control and censorship of printing and publication. John Penry, the supposed ringleader of the Marprelate gang, had just been arrested, and was to be executed on 29 May 1593. Despite his intense interest in their affairs, it was relatively unusual for Whitgift himself to sign the Stationers’ licences. But he had already twice done so in the case of books published by Richard Field: Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso in February 1591 and a French primer in June 1592.63 The fact that Whitgift also signed the licence for Venus and Adonis may conceivably reflect some special favour towards two talented young men from Stratford, a town that Whitgift knew quite well: the publisher and printer Field, and the player, playwright and poet Shakespeare. Perhaps the Archbishop had even been foremost among those persons ‘of worship’ who had convinced Chettle, the previous year, that in spite of his profession as a player and his neglect of the dying Greene Shakspeare was both honest and gifted. By performing prominently in a play written by Whitgift’s ‘Nash gentleman’, his leading champion in the pamphlet wars, Shakespeare may also have indicated very clearly whose side he was on in the Marprelate battle. In the spring of 1593, with the theatres still closed because of plague, Shakespeare could step aside from his socially dubious

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profession as a motley player and acquire money, fame and every kind of prestige by dedicating a brilliantly sophisticated poem to a promising young aristocrat, the Earl of Southampton. This was even better than performing a play commissioned by Archbishop Whitgift. All of these positive developments were to be further reinforced in the spring of 1594 with the publication of Lucrece, also published by Field, and also dedicated to Southampton. The supposed ‘upstart Crow’ was no longer ‘beautified’ with feathers borrowed from earlier playwrights, but was starting to take flight as a poet whose work could be admired by readers who never came near the playhouses. Some years later, however, Shakespeare’s continued career as a player was to catch up with him once again, and to get him into further trouble. It is almost certainly these later troubles, to be discussed in Chapter 3, that are glanced at in Sonnets 110 and 111.64

TWO THREE EARLY READERS Before resuming discussion of Shakespeare’s own agency in shaping his image I shall consider his writings from the point of view of some of his fans. This chapter is focused on the recorded responses of three individuals who encountered ‘Shakespeare’ texts while they were new. Though diverse in status and personality, these men resemble each other in responding in ways that are essentially reductive. All three simplified what they read, while the third brought florid obsessions of his own to his response. Nevertheless, the detailed attention each one gave to Shakespeare’s compositions typifies the intense interest shown in them by early readers and auditors, and the immediate admiration provoked by his wittily original phrases and striking observations.

i. henry peacham, playgoer Henry Peacham the younger (1578–c. 1644) has been as much berated as praised for the drawing he made which appears to provide a unique visual image of one of Shakespeare’s plays in performance in the Elizabethan period.1 He has been berated still more for the accompanying manuscript text. E.K. Chambers, one of the earliest scholars to discuss the single-sheet Longleat document, commented with undisguised irritation on the forty lines from Titus Andronicus which have been carefully written out beneath the drawing. He assumed that these were the result of a clumsy attempt to represent the play as printed in 1594, and remarked finally that ‘why [Peacham] should have perverted the Quarto text for the purpose of making an illustration of it, it is

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difficult to see’.2 Rather than being grateful to Peacham for having left us these records, many later twentieth-century scholars took their tone from the magisterial Chambers, likewise turning away from the document in bafflement and annoyance. Thoughtlessly, Peacham failed to provide the kind of data that modern editors would have found most useful. It is remarkable that editors of Titus Andronicus do not even collate the lines that appear in the Longleat manuscript. Nevertheless, I believe, Peacham’s treatment of the text of which he provided a record was fairly normal in terms of the practice of individuals in Shakespeare’s period who gathered ‘commonplaces’ from contemporary literature. Like most of such ‘commonplacers’, Peacham reduced a long and complex text to a few simple and morally transparent images. While most modern critics, especially since William Empson’s discovery of the aesthetic and intellectual delights of ambiguity, hunt for originality and complexity, Renaissance readers were trained to extract pithy ‘sentences’ from what they read or heard: clear, memorable expressions of moral truisms.3 Parallels to what Peacham was doing are to be found in the ‘commonplaces’ drawn from playtexts by Edward Pudsey (1573–1612/13), discussed more fully in the next section.4 Some of these appear to be based on notes made during performances. Like Peacham, Pudsey extracts conventional notions from complex texts, often in wilful defiance of what we might regard as the ‘true’ import of a passage in its full context. This can be clearly seen in one of Pudsey’s quotations from Othello: ‘An equalitye of perfections fit in marriage for when the act ys past there wilbe much needing the help of beauty youth love and such lyke to prevent loathing.’5 Iago’s poisonously cynical suggestion to the gullible Roderigo that Desdemona will soon get tired of her old, black husband – When the blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should be, again to inflame it, and to give satiety a fresh appetite, loveliness in favour, sympathy in years, manners and beauties, all which the Moor is defective in. (Oth 2.1.224–8)

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– has been summarized by Pudsey to yield an apparently unironic generalization about the requirements for a successful marriage. Perhaps the actor who performed Iago was so charismatic that at this early stage of the play many audience members were, like Roderigo and Othello, wholly persuaded by his speeches. Like Pudsey, Peacham may have been recalling a performance. Alan Hughes, one of the best recent scholars to discuss the Peacham document, concludes by suggesting that Peacham ‘drew from memory, and perhaps saw a performance in 1594’. He makes a telling point. Comparing the depiction of Tamora with Peacham’s representations of women and female figures in his published emblem books, he observes ‘that there ought to be some sign, if this is a woman, of the beginning of breasts just above the left arm’.6 If Hughes had been able to examine three emblem books by Peacham that survive in autograph manuscript he could have made the point even more strongly. All three are based on passages in James I’s Basilikon Doron, the first and third intended for Henry, Prince of Wales, the second for the King himself. Only the third, in the British Library’s Royal Collection, appears to be a presentation copy.7 Peacham’s practice of showing female figures as fully breasted is clear in all three. This may be seen in two examples in the earliest one, Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 146: Emblema VI, fo. 3v, and Emblema XVI, fo. 8v. This was ‘composed in 1603–4’, when the Prince was aged only nine or ten.8 If Hughes’s conjecture that the tall and flat-chested Tamora of Peacham’s sketch reflects what he saw in the playhouse is correct, it may also suggest that commanding female roles such as that of Tamora were sometimes performed by men rather than boys. Another likely candidate for such casting might be the loquacious virago Margaret of Anjou in 2 and 3 Henry VI. However, I am not sure how far we can rely on this, since Tamora’s size in the drawing may reflect the character’s prominence in the scene, rather than the physical size of the performer relative to that of the actor playing Titus, whom she confronts. More secure is Hughes’s conclusion that Peacham’s drawing relates to a memory of a performance, and is not an image based on imaginative

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reading of a printed text of the play. In the case of the latter, as a matriarch she would surely be imagined as having large breasts. The Tamora of Peacham’s sketch would certainly appear to be based on a male performer, whether boy or man. A possible reason why Peacham produced both the drawing and the text is that he had indeed seen a performance, and was, like others, greatly impressed by this experience, and most of all by the massed entries and visual spectacle of the play’s opening scene (likely, as it happens, to be the work of George Peele rather than of Shakespeare).9 Jacques Petit, a Frenchman employed by Sir John Harington of Exton, was especially struck by the ‘monstre’, or visual spectacle, of Titus when he saw the play performed by ‘les commediens de Londres’ at Burley-on-the-Hill as part of his master’s Christmas festivities in January 1596.10 Edward Pudsey was also impressed by Titus, and especially by its opening scene, though in this instance he seems to have been relying on a printed text. Peacham may have decided to create an aide-memoire of the performance that he saw, either for his own records, or more probably for the benefit of friends, family members or patrons who had not seen it. The manuscript’s pre-Longleat provenance is unknown. But Peacham was to spend most of his life as a schoolmaster. Another possible scenario is that the extracts from Titus were prepared for the edification of children in a noble household. His intensive labours over emblem books intended for the edification of Henry, Prince of Wales (see above), furnish a plausible parallel. Perhaps the intended audience for the Titus extracts were young members of the Thynne family, and the document has always been at Longleat. Alternatively, this may be among those Elizabethan manuscripts at Longleat that derive from the collection of Michael Hicks, secretary to Robert Cecil. If the manuscript comes from this source, it could possibly have been prepared for the future edification of Cecil’s son and daughter, born in 1591 and 1593. Whatever his intended audience, it seems that Peacham deliberately adapted what he saw and heard in order to fashion a freestanding extract with a childishly simple message – indeed, a message that could be labelled as ‘commonplace’ in the modern sense.

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Fig. 3. Drawing by Henry Peacham combining two episodes in Titus Andronicus (1594).

By the standards of his age Peacham was long-lived. One of the last of his many published works, The Truth of our Times (1638), provides testimony both to his exceptional powers of memory and his early enthusiasm for the theatre. Well characterized by his biographer as ‘an unembittered recollection of a lifetime’s disappointments’, The Truth of our Times is a charming collection of reflective essays rich in anecdotes from the high Elizabethan era of Peacham’s youth.11 Several of these reflect vivid impressions of plays that he had seen during this period. For instance, having worked for many years as an unhappy and somewhat reluctant schoolmaster, Peacham had developed something of an obsession with the problems caused to schoolmasters by over-doting mothers who refuse to allow their sons to be properly educated. As an awful warning to such erring parents he points out that foolish and badly brought up youths will find themselves publicly ridiculed in the playhouses: Hence we see them often brought upon the Stage under the names of Sir Simple, John Daw, Abraham Ninny, and the like, their study being nothing else but the newest fashion, what Tavern to goe to dinner to, or stare at every post to see where the newest play is that afternoone.12

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Since playgoing was a favourite recreation for such idle young men Peacham viewed such works as Jonson’s ‘Humours’ comedies as especially well-aimed satires. Another passage suggests that Peacham may have been particularly interested in Jonson’s ‘Humours’ plays. As a further example of bad parenting, this time in an unkind father, he describes a ‘miserable slave’ who hoarded ‘three or fourescore load of Hay’ in the hope that its price would rise during a period of dearth. Finding its price to fall rather than rise because of good weather, he tried to hang himself in his barn. His son, ‘hearing the stoole fall’, ran in, cut his father down and restored him to life. At the end of the week the miserly father deducted twopence from his son’s wages to cover the value of the damaged rope. Though narrated as if it were a piece of genuine reportage – ‘There was a miserable slave not long since’ – this anecdote appears to be based, consciously or unconsciously, on the miserly farmer Sordido in Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour (1.3; 3.7), who likewise tries to hang himself in disappointment at low grain prices, only to complain bitterly, when cut down, at the cost of the spoiled rope. The story derives from Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, but was often appropriated as a ‘reallife’ narrative.13 Shakespeare gave it further theatrical currency in the Porter in Macbeth’s allusion to the miserly ‘farmer who killed himself in expectation of plenty’ (2.3.4–5). But in terms of providing both an explanation and a model for the Longleat Titus document the most extended and explicit theatrical reminiscence in The Truth of our Times is the most telling. It has often been referred to, but not very often quoted in full, as here: I remember when I was a School-boy in London, Tarlton acted a third sons part, such a one as I now speake of: His father being a very rich man, and lying upon his death-bed, called his three sonnes about him, who with teares, and on their knees craved his blessing, and to the eldest sonne, said hee, you are mine heire, and my land must descend upon you, and I pray God blesse you with it:

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The eldest sonne replyed, Father, I trust in God you shall yet live to enjoy it your selfe. To the second sonne, (said he) you are a scholler, and what profession soever you take upon you, out of my land I allow you threescore pounds a yeare towards your maintenance, and three hundred pounds to buy you books, as his brother, he weeping answer’d. I trust father you shall live to enjoy your money your selfe, I desire it not, &c. To the third, which was Tarlton, (who came in like a rogue in a foule shirt without a band, and in a blew coat with one sleeve, his stockings out at the heeles, and his head full of straw and feathers) as for you sirrah, quoth he, you know how often I have fetched you out of Newgate and Bridewell, you have been an ungracious villaine, I have nothing to bequeath to you but the gallowes and a rope: Tarlton weeping and sobbing upon his knees (as his brothers) said, O Father, I doe not desire it, I trust in God you shall live to enjoy it your selfe.14 Three points in this passage are especially worth noticing in the context of the Longleat document. The first is that Peacham, in his late sixties, is recalling a play that he saw when he was no more than ten. Tarlton died in September 1588 and Peacham was born in 1578. Such detailed recollections of a play seen in childhood are not unique in the period, however, for the seventy-five-yearold Robert Willis wrote an even more detailed account of an otherwise unknown play called The Cradle of Security that he had seen with his father when he was a little boy.15 Secondly, Peacham’s detailed description of Tarlton’s costume suggests an especially keen visual memory, and/or a sketch made at the time either by his father or himself. There is also a visual reminiscence of the scene’s full staging in the detail about Tarlton ‘weeping and sobbing upon his knees (as his brothers)’. Thirdly, the detailed account of the brothers’ speeches, mainly in direct quotation, also suggests an exceptionally good verbal memory and/or recourse to a written record made at the time. Perhaps the most telling feature

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is the ‘&c.’ after the second brother’s speech, suggesting that as delivered on stage the scholarly young man’s speech was a good deal longer. Since this unidentified play seems never to have reached print Peacham can have had no assistance from a printed text. Many other passages in Peacham’s writings reflect his interest in plays and in various kinds of public entertainment. In the dedicatory epistle to his friend H.C. that prefaces his 1608 collection of epigrams The more the merier he mentions the fashion for ‘Satyrick’ writing, ‘which of late seemes to have beene very familiar among our Poets and Players to their cost’. This appears to allude to the 1599 Bishops’ Bans on such writings. In the same work’s epistle ‘To the Reader’ Peacham compares his latest appearance in print to Tarlton’s trademark trick of entering by suddenly thrusting his head through the tiring-house curtain, which was said to provoke immediate laughter: ‘like Tarleton, I see once againe I must thrust my head out of doores to be laughed at, and venture a hissing amongst you’.16 Tarlton’s practice was mentioned by Nashe in Pierce Penilesse (1592), where he describes a pompous magistrate having a play presented before him and his Towne-ship by Tarlton and the rest of his fellowes, her Majesties servants, and they were now entring into their first merriment (as they call it), the people began exceedingly to laugh, when Tarlton first peept out his head.17 In the light of the long Tarlton anecdote quoted earlier, Peacham may have witnessed this practice himself as a child, in addition to reading about it in Nashe. He alludes to it once again in an epigram on ‘Sir Ninian Ouzell’ in Thalia’s banquet: As Tarlton when his head was onely seene, The Tire-house doore and Tapistrie betweene, Set all the mulltitude in such a laughter, They could not hold for scarse an houre after.18 Other examples suggest that Peacham was as much interested in observing playgoers as in watching the play itself. In Epigram 2 in

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The more the merier Peacham alluded to a ‘Country Maior’ sitting pompously in a ‘Wainscot chaire, / To censure all, when Players are in towne’, and in Epigram 18 he addressed the ‘honest whoores’ who ‘Lady-like ride in your guilt Coaches’ ‘to see a play’. Like The Truth of our Times, Peacham’s late comic dialogue Coach and Sedan (1636) incorporates a detailed reminiscence from school days. Here, a speaker called ‘Countreyman’, ‘a plaine Countrie Farmer’, laments the decline of Merrie England. This seems to be a thinly veiled reminiscence by Peacham himself, always eager to boast about his own literary achievements. ‘Countreyman’ is made to quote admiringly from one of Peacham’s poems, his Elegie on the Countesse of Warwicke, ‘latelie Printed’.19 ‘Countreyman’ seems to be just the same age as Peacham himself, since he remembers the hanging up of gaudy Spanish ensigns in London after the defeat of the Armada in 1588, ‘being then a Schoole-boy in London, about tenne yeeres of age’.20 At the time of the following performance-related anecdote ‘Countreyman’/ Peacham could have been even younger: when I was a Grammar-scholler our master to revive our spirits dulled with studie, would make us Comoedies, and because even now I spoke of Onions I will repeat the prologue of one of our plaies, which I my selfe spoke upon the stage, and it was this. Even as the Duck in river navigable Is serv’d with Onions to a great mans table; So, will wee doe our best to give content To the meanest of this rascall rablement. Which I pronouncing distinctly, and with a good grace I was mervailously applauded (by clapping of hands) of the multitude; maides tossed apples to mee, and our Schoole-masters wife offered me her bottle of Rosa-solis to drink.21 This sounds like a delightful small-scale comedy performed by boys in the lower grammar school, perhaps as young as seven or eight, for whom memorizing and reciting even four lines of verse

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was a significant achievement. Here, too, we have a full quotation from a play that does not appear to have reached print. Peacham was still keen on plays when he got to Trinity College, Cambridge. In The Compleat Gentleman he writes of the useful function fulfilled by Gabriel Harvey in providing undergraduates with a comic butt as a character in academic drama: ‘He made us good sport in that excellent Comedy of Pedantius . . . and if I bee not deceived, in Priscianus vapulans, and many of our English Playes.’22 If we consider such anecdotes as these in conjunction with Peacham’s extended account of Tarlton’s performance there is food for thought with reference to the Longleat document. In a well-known passage in The Compleat Gentleman Peacham records that he was ‘ever naturally from a child’ in the habit of ‘taking, in white and blacke, the countenance of some one or other’. He sometimes got into trouble for doing this when he was a schoolboy, and was beaten.23 In contrast to his own mentors, when he himself became a schoolmaster he positively encouraged his pupils both to draw and to paint. In an affectionate epistle addressed to a favourite former pupil, Edward Chamberlain of Barnham Broom, Norfolk, he looks back nostalgically to their nature walks, their music with voices and viols, and those times when they Another while with pencill or with pen, Have limnd or drawn our friends pourtaies; & then Commixing many colours into one, Have imitated some carnation, Strange field-found flower, or a rare seene flie, A curious land-schap or a clouded sky . . .24 Given the full quotations included both in the Tarlton anecdote in The Truth of our Times and the ‘duck and onion’ anecdote in Coach and Sedan, it seems likely that in addition to sketching people, plants and landscapes, Peacham was also in the habit of making verbal transcriptions, perhaps in some form of shorthand. It is difficult otherwise to account for his transmission of coherent verbal extracts from unprinted plays performed half a century earlier.

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As already mentioned, Alan Hughes, editor of the New Cambridge Titus, concludes that in the Longleat document Peacham ‘drew from memory, without consulting the text’. Certainly the physical apparatus required either for formal drawing or notetaking – pens, ink and knives, as well as a steady flat surface on which to rest the paper or ‘table-book’ – would make detailed writing and drawing ad vivum while sitting on a playhouse bench or stool extremely difficult. There might also be objections from the door-keeper, alert to the danger that an unauthorized transcript might be sold with no benefit to the company. Nevertheless, it may have been possible to make quick pencil sketches and notes that could later be more fully worked up in ink. In The Gentlemans Exercise (1612) Peacham recommends the use of what we would now describe as lead pencils for making preliminary drafts: ‘you must first get your blacke lead sharpned finely: and put fast into quils, for your rude and first draught, some ten or twelve’.25 Alternatively, he may have possessed a ‘table-book’, a commercially produced notebook with a specially prepared surface on which writing (or drawing) could be done with a silverpoint stylus and later wiped clean for re-use.26 In a period in which the art of memorizing spoken utterance as fully as possible was systematically taught and studied, especially for the benefit of those who wanted to recall sermons, a quick-witted individual may have been able to memorize some striking speeches in the playhouse, perhaps with the help of jottings pencilled in shorthand. Could the whole of the Longleat document, drawing and speeches alike, have been constructed, and reshaped, on the basis of notes and sketches made in the playhouse? (For a text of the speeches, see Appendix, pp. 261–2.) Some of the oddities of which modern scholars have complained might be accounted for by such a scenario. For instance, much has been made of the ‘mistake’ in the opening heading, ‘Enter Tamora pleadinge for her sonnes going to execution’, since in the printed text only a single son, Alarbus, is threatened with ritual slaughter and sacrifice. Yet in performance Peacham would have seen Tamora enter with multiple sons, all of whom presumably joined their mother and brothers in kneeling supplication,

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and his visual memory may at this point have overridden his verbal one. In lines 4, 6 and 10 of the ensuing manuscript text Tamora also pleads for her ‘sonnes’, not ‘son’. However, in the second example there may have been support for this in the text as spoken in performance, since the Folio text also reads ‘sons’ here: ‘O think my sonnes to be as deere to mee’. This is an acceptable reading, since Tamora here makes a broad comparison between Titus’s love for his own surviving sons and hers for her own. If Peacham heard ‘sons’ in one of these three lines he may have thought, mistakenly, that he had heard it thus in the other lines as well. In performance ‘sons’ would not necessarily sound very different from ‘son’. Alternatively, if his extracts were based on rapid jottings, the often rather inconspicuous tail used as an ‘es’ contraction in secretary hand may not have made it absolutely clear whether one ‘sonn’ or plural ‘sonnes’ were in question in lines 4 and 10. In the final line of her speech in the Longleat document Tamora pleads, in correct accordance with the printed texts, only for ‘my first borne sonne’. Peacham, I suggest, with the keen visual memory attested elsewhere, recalled having seen ‘sons’ in the plural kneel behind their mother on the stage, and accordingly included two sons in his sketch. He also transcribed all three occurrences of the word in Tamora’s speech as ‘sons’ until he was reminded by this line that it was only the first-born who was threatened with execution. Rather than mess up a very neatly written text with deletions, something good scribes were always loath to do, I suggest that he made additions to the page to function as late corrections. He caused the Moor depicted on the far right – whom we assume, in the light of his ensuing speech in the text below, to be Aaron – to hold his sword immediately above the head of the nearest of the two kneeling sons, while pointing clearly at his head with his left hand as if to say, ‘This is the son for whom Tamora is pleading.’ The very heavy inking of the Moor’s sword and hand, and also of the elder son’s hair and beard, is inconsistent with the much lighter inking of the rest of the drawing. The beard itself may also be an addition made to

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indicate the greater maturity of the son in question. At some point Peacham also remembered, or else was reminded either by the 1594 quarto text or by some companion who had been with him at the performance, that Tamora’s first-born son was called Alarbus, and he added that name at the bottom of the page. This is not a speech heading for a non-extant speech, as has often been assumed. The two flourishes at the end of Aaron’s speech make it clear that the text fashioned by Peacham is complete. The name ‘Alarbus’ has been written well below the block of text and is then followed by two long text-width pen strokes. It functions simply as a record of the name of the young man who, despite his mother’s pleas, was brutally killed and dismembered in accordance with the command of the victorious Titus: ‘Alarbus’ limbs are lopped’ (Tit 1.1.146). As already suggested, the text that follows the drawing has its own internal coherence. Titus’s opening line to Tamora has been changed from Patient yourself, madam, and pardon me to Patient your self madame for dy hee must. In this modified version Titus is more relentless and less courtly than in the printed texts. He offers no plea for forgiveness, merely a bald corroboration of his presentation to his own eldest son, Lucius, of the ‘proudest prisoner of the Goths’ for dismemberment and sacrifice. Lines 20–21 do not occur in any printed text of Titus. They appear to have been composed by Peacham to create a link between the slaughter of Alarbus in Act 1 (a scene that we now know to be mainly the work of George Peele) and the execution of Aaron in Act 5 (a scene which is probably entirely by Shakespeare). These added lines would suggest to a reader unfamiliar with the full text that the two events occur in immediate succession, with the word ‘likewise’ serving to yoke together analogous scenes in which savage barbarians face the full might of Roman retribution:

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Aaron do you likewise prepare your selfe And now at last repent your wicked life. In the printed texts it is Lucius, rather than his father Titus, who presides over Aaron’s punishment. By making Titus prosecutor of Aaron the Moor as well as of Alarbus the Goth, Peacham has created a greatly simplified playlet which has its own clear if crude exemplary force. Speaking three pivotal lines, Titus is centrally positioned both in the image and in the text. He gestures behind him to the two oddly costumed guards who will, we assume, preside over the two executions. On the right are the victims of Titus’s authority, itself visually embodied in the flametopped staff that he holds in front of him and which occupies the centre of the picture. The two long speeches that precede and follow Titus’s three central lines complement each other. Tamora’s plea for mercy is undoubtedly cogent, and especially so in the two lines that were also to catch the eye of Edward Pudsey in the early 1600s. These are quoted fully by Peacham: Wilt thou drawe neere the nature of the Godes Drawe neere them then in being mercifull but are reduced to a prose aphorism by Pudsey: ‘Yf that thou wilt draw neere the nature of the gods, bee mercifull &c.’ 27 As in the summary from Othello quoted above, Pudsey extracted a plodding moral aphorism from a speech by a character who ought in a full theatrical context to be regarded as morally suspect. As often happens in the theatre, the second speech transcribed by Peacham will cause a reader radically to revise the impression created by the first. Tamora’s rhetoric has the serpent-like plausibility often associated with her sex in this period, and her plea for mercy seems hard to resist. In contrast, Aaron’s defiantly unrepentant catalogue of murders and gratuitous cruelties leaves a reader/audience member with no conceivable room for doubt that he must and will be executed. His own closing lines (‘. . . nothing greives mee hartily indeede / For that I cannot do ten thousand more’) show that he knows that he is about to die and can therefore – to his regret – commit no more crimes.

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As a whole, Peacham’s text provides an image of Titus as an inexorable Roman lawgiver. Deaf to the slippery pleas of the Queen of the Goths, he will cause ‘execution’ to be carried out both on her first-born son and on her Moorish confederate and lover. Aaron’s defiant speech validates both killings. In a period in which many penal executions were performed in public places as an exemplary warning to the populace, Peacham extracted a dramatic and visual equivalent of such an admonitory display from Peele and Shakespeare’s richly complex and ambiguous play. A modern reader, audience member or scholar will view this as a gross distortion. For us, the Titus of the final act is no longer an imposing figure of Roman military and civic authority but an outsider and malcontent, at odds with the Emperor Saturninus as well as with the Goths. His extreme sufferings also appear to have driven him mad. However, Peacham’s aim was not to provide full textual data for the benefit of future editors of the play, or useful documentation for theatre historians. Like many enthusiastic playgoers and readers of the period he wanted to extract something clear-cut and morally straightforward from an artefact which, viewed in its totality, was extremely disturbing. To a modern audience, it may be by no means clear even in Act 1 that Titus is morally superior to Tamora, especially if Titus’s onstage killing of his own son Mutius is retained (Tit 1.1.294–6). And even without this shocking and morally confusing episode, which some editors have sidelined as a late and not fully assimilated ‘compositional’ insertion,28 Titus’s deployment of the ritual slaughter and sacrifice of Tamora’s eldest son as a form of state-sanctioned revenge can be seen as an obvious, and arguably deserved, trigger for the extreme sufferings subsequently endured both by his daughter Lavinia and himself. Yet Peacham’s morally simplified version, in which both killings are presented simply as ‘execution’, is at least consonant with the full text’s horribly crude closing lines, which focus on the ultimate humiliation and punishment of ‘that ravenous tiger, Tamora’, following a loving tribute to the dead Titus by his grandson. Like Peacham’s extract, the closing scene of the full text encourages the audience to align

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themselves, like the most bigoted of home-team football supporters, wholly on the side of the Romans and against the Goths. Such crude ‘moral’ alignments would be easily understood even by child readers. Peacham, I suggest, did not ‘pervert’ the quarto text of Titus – if this text was indeed his source, rather than memory, notes and sketches. Like most collectors of commonplaces and quotations of the period, he extracted, and in part manufactured, a conventional and blindingly obvious admonitory message. Imperial Romans such as Titus gave no quarter either to Goths or Moors. Aaron’s boastful catalogue of his misdeeds shows how right they were not to do so. Characteristically, as a man who from boyhood had been a compulsive sketcher, Peacham also produced a visual image to illustrate the elided scene that he had created. His graphic skills were to improve considerably with study and experience in later years. This rather clumsy sketch was done when he was fresh out of Cambridge, if the 1595 date is right. But though the drawing is rather crude, and does not correspond fully with any one scene in the play, it conforms perfectly well with the ‘edited highlights’ written below it. These show first Tamora and then Aaron preparing to receive the comeuppance due to them as savage barbarians. If the lines are read thus, the only serious anomaly is the use of Aaron to indicate that it is only the first-born son of Tamora who is going to ‘execution’. This, I’ve suggested, is probably an improvised afterthought introduced by Peacham to correct a mistake in the first speech. Though it does not provide either a full, or a fully accurate, record of what was seen and spoken, Peacham’s manuscript may still have things to tell us about costumes and staging. Tamora’s flat-chestedness suggests that male actors in female roles did not wear false breasts. Titus’s bare legs and feet may bear witness to a stage convention for displaying the newly unarmed limbs of a returning war hero, a motif that was to occur again in the opening scenes of several later Shakespeare plays. The plumes on the helmet of the first Roman guard, and on the bonnet of the second, offer us a glimpse of the ‘plume of feathers’ that was a charac-

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teristic prop of the Elizabethan actor. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, over-excited after the success of The Murder of Gonzago in proving his step-father’s guilt, boasts to Horatio that all that he now needs are swankily decorated shoes and ‘a forest of feathers’ to ‘get me a fellowship in a cry of players’ (Ham 3.2.267–70). There are also a couple of points at which Peacham’s written text is of some interest. In line 30 the reading ‘haystackes’ is distinctly superior to Q1’s ‘hay stalkes’. Though J.C. Maxwell discovered that ‘haystalks’ could be a Hertfordshire dialect version of ‘hay stacks’, there seems little doubt that Peacham’s ‘haystackes’ would be more readily understood by an Elizabethan audience in London. Q1’s reading is replaced, surely correctly, by ‘hay stakes’/‘haystackes’ in Q2. Likewise, Aaron’s triumphant ‘Tut’ in line 38 is superior to Q1’s ‘But’. There is a single reading that is unique to Longleat, ‘brestes’ for ‘skinnes’ in line 35. It reads well, with an emphatic alliteration on ‘brestes’ and ‘barke’. I suggest that ‘brestes’ is either what Peacham heard the actor say in perfor mance, or that the word is his own (conscious or unconscious) ‘improvement’ of the text. I find it strange that editors of the play have not cited and discussed at least this unique reading from the Longleat document. A further possibility, in the case of the ‘skins’/‘breasts’ variant, is that either the actor playing Barabas, or Peacham, or both, were influenced by the long speech in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta that is echoed here, in the course of which Barabas boasts that he used sometimes to drive men to suicide: And every Moone made some or other mad, And now and then one hang himselfe for griefe, Pinning upon his breast a long great scrolle How I with interest tormented them.29 To speculate a little further, is it possible that the actor who played Aaron in the performance of Titus seen by Peacham had recently played Barabas, and slipped into a word – ‘breast(s)’ – from the speech by Marlowe on which that in Titus is so evidently modelled?

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We should be grateful to Peacham for suggestive details such as these, and bitterly regret the fact that no further manuscript records of his youthful playgoing appear to have survived.

ii. edward pudsey, reader and playgoer Like that of Henry Peacham, the cultural life of Edward Pudsey (1573–1612/13) awaits comprehensive analysis.30 Unlike Peacham, Pudsey was not a published writer, and does not appear to have followed any profession. As the eldest son of a landed Derbyshire gentleman he may not have needed to do so. The single commonplace book that has survived from a larger collection of notebooks shows him to have been a diligent student of books concerning ‘history and philosophy’, as well as of ‘current events and controversies’.31 He was both a close reader of printed plays and a keenly interested playgoer. In all, the surviving notebook contains extracts from nearly thirty plays, eight of them by Shakespeare. His short extracts from Othello, one of which was quoted above (p. 56), must derive from a performance, since the play did not reach print until 1622.32 It seems likely therefore that some of his other extracts were so derived. Pudsey also sometimes knew things about plays that could not be discovered from a printed text. For instance, he ascribed the comedy Jack Drum’s Entertainment to Marston even though no printed text includes an author’s name. This is a correct attribution, which has also been reached independently by modern scholars applying linguistic and stylistic tests.33 Though Pudsey’s treatment of Shakespeare’s texts was, like Peacham’s, reductive and conventionalizing, it is nevertheless fascinating in identifying the elements in them that an early reader thought most worth remembering. His extracts may also occasionally have things to tell us about the plays in performance. The preamble to Pudsey’s will suggests Calvinistic piety, but several of its details may reflect both enthusiasm for plays and playgoing and some continuing interest in the theatre. A bequest to one good friend and executor of a ‘velvet jerkin, carnation silk

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stockings and garters’ and to another of ‘gold-coloured silk stockings, black garters, scarlet waistcoat’, suggest that he possessed and still prized the kind of flashily expensive garments in which young gallants liked to be seen when attending the playhouses. His bequest to his son Edward not only of lands but also of ‘All his books . . . especially notebooks, or at least such as executors think fit’ also suggests lasting pride in his own writings. As David Kathman has pointed out, the single surviving notebook, carefully entitled ‘Edward Pudseys Booke. 1600’, ‘is more wide-ranging and neatly organized than most commonplace books of the time’. It seems to have passed into the hands of his friend John Deighton (or Daighton) ‘of Gloster’, who was also the recipient of the goldcoloured stockings and scarlet waistcoat. Perhaps Deighton, an executor of the will, cherished and retained it specifically because of its extracts from plays. We know quite a lot about John Deighton, who was a surgeon in the city of Gloucester. An inventory of his books includes 186 items, over sixty of them non-medical.34 Deighton may have felt that Edward Pudsey Junior, only six or seven years old at the time of his father’s death, should not be exposed to such secular material, since his father’s dying wish was that the boy would eventually ‘study divinity’ at the university. No record of his matriculation has been found. However, an ‘Edward Pudsey’ who seems almost certain to have been the note-taker’s son is recorded as an actor in Germany in 1628 and 1640. The younger Edward Pudsey’s choice of profession suggests that family tradition, or his father’s notebooks, or both, attracted him to such a career. His mother, Edith Faban, must also have been highly literate, for her husband left her ‘six books of divinity, which she chooses’, and he entrusted her with the education of their son and daughter during their minority. As E.A.J. Honigmann has pointed out, Pudsey’s extracts from Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet include readings which sometimes tally with the first printing, sometimes with the second.35 They may therefore derive from neither, but from notes ‘jotted down during a performance’. Alternatively, Pudsey may have combined direct examination of a printed text with notes taken during a

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performance. A comprehensive analysis of Pudsey’s theatrical extracts is beyond the scope of the present study. But I would like initially to explore his general habits, and then to consider especially his treatment of Hamlet, from which he took nearly fifty extracts, more even than from Much Ado, from which he took forty. Like Peacham’s manuscript, Pudsey’s notebook is widely ignored by editors. So far as I can discover, Honigmann is the only editor of a Shakespeare play (Othello) to cite and discuss the extracts taken from it by Pudsey. Pudsey’s name is not mentioned by the latest Arden editors of Much Ado and Hamlet. Among much else, Pudsey made notes on five works by Thomas Nashe. In the case of one, Christs teares, we can establish the edition he used, for he quoted an observation from Nashe’s epistle ‘TO THE READER’ which appears only in the 1594 edition: ‘The Potecaries at Venice to approve their methridate to the Phisicions, take spyders & eat them’. This corresponds word for word with the original except for the word ‘Potecaries’, where Nashe had ‘druggiers’.36 Pudsey’s habit of substituting synonyms for words in the books he read should serve as a caveat when we consider the extent to which variants in his dramatic extracts may reflect what he heard in the playhouse. One of Pudsey’s habitual interests was in generalizations about women, especially of a negative and/or prurient kind. For instance, of seven short extracts that he made from Richard III three fall into this category. The first is Richard’s quip that no one except the King should do ‘naught’ with Mistress Shore, which he represents as ‘Naught to doe etc.’,37 and the second, from Richard’s wooing of Lady Anne, appears as ‘Teach not thy lippes such scorne for they were made for &c.’38 In both cases Pudsey’s ‘&c.’ may have a prurient suggestion, the first denoting sexual relations, the second kissing. In the third such extract Buckingham talks ungallantly to Richard about the ‘beauty-waning’ widow of Edward IV, ‘Even in the afternoon of her best days’.39 Pudsey has written ‘Aged’ in the margin facing his extract, ‘In the afternoone of her best dayes &c.’, suggesting that he views this as

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a useful phrase to apply to some ‘aged’ lady at a future date. In one of his extracts from Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse we can see Pudsey hard at work extracting a misogynistic image of women as devils, or devils as women, from a passage that in its full context is considerably more wide-ranging. First Nashe: The Spirits that entice men to gluttonie and lust, are certaine watry spirits of the West, and certaine Southerne spirits as Nefrach & Kelen . . . they wander through lakes, fish ponds, and fennes, and overwhelme ships, cast boates upon ankers, and drowne men that are swimming: therefore are they counted the most pestilent, troublesome, and guilefull spirits that are . . . and if ever they appeare to anie man, they come in womens apparell.40 Based closely on a Latin treatise by Georgius Pictorius, Nashe’s account is sensuous and lyrical, rhetorically enacting the dangerous ‘enticement’ that it describes. Pudsey boils it down thus: women The vylest spirits will never appeare but in the likeness of a woman: they are called Nefrach & Kellen. While Nashe’s passage warns ‘men’ against subtle and powerful temptations, Pudsey simply says something nasty about the kinship between ‘women’ and the ‘vylest’ devils. The epithet ‘vylest’ is his own, a crude summation of Nashe’s ‘pestilent, troublesome, and guilefull’; and whereas Nashe’s ‘watry spirits’ ‘come in womens apparell’, Pudsey’s are ‘in the likeness of a woman’, suggesting full metamorphosis rather than superficial disguise. A further habit of Pudsey’s that can be illustrated from his Nashe extracts is that of turning verse into prose. Two examples from ‘Will S.’, that is, Summers last will and testament, make this clear. In the first, Solstitium justifies himself for not remaining in the presence of his Lord Summer: summer But hadst thou alwayes kept thee in my sight, Thy good deserts, though silent, would have askt.

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solstitium Deserts, my Lord, of ancient servitours Are like old sores, which may not be ript up.41 From this Pudsey draws a prose adage about what he categorizes in the margin as an observation about ‘Deserts’: ‘desertes of ancient servants are lyke old sores which may not be ript up’. The next example is even more reductive. In Nashe, Autumne satirizes the zodiacal huntsman Orion and his many hunting dogs: Each one of those foule-mouthed mangy dogs Governes a day, (no dog but hath his day,) And all the daies by them so governed, The Dog-daies hight.42 From Autumne’s rhetorical fantasy Pudsey draws a bare and apparently literal statement about the nature of a ‘Dogstar’: ‘Every dog starre governes a day where uppon every dog hath his daye.’ Sometimes – and there are many examples of this also in his extracts from Shakespeare – Pudsey simply selects a witty phrase which he decontextualizes. For instance, in his notes on Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599) he draws on Nashe’s extended reflections on the capacity of the town of Yarmouth to feed a ‘monstrous army of strangers’ who arrived in the port by sea for ten weeks every year, ‘a matter that egregiously bepuzled and entranced my apprehension’. From this he took no more than ‘yt bepuzled my apprehension’. To a modern reader it may seem baffling that Pudsey went to the trouble of reading the complex and wide-ranging writings of Nashe only to reduce them to short phrases and predictable aphorisms. But we should consider this another way. Like most of his contemporaries, Pudsey had been taught to extract witty and/ or edifying material from his reading. It is to his credit that he chose to do so by exploring groundbreaking texts by ‘difficult’ contemporary writers such as Nashe, Harvey, Jonson, Marston, Chapman and Shakespeare, rather than simply garnering his ‘sentences’ and ‘commonplaces’ ready-made from moral treatises or florilegia. Also, Pudsey may have been genuinely excited and stimulated by the complicated adventurousness of contemporary

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literary texts, even if what reached his notebooks rarely reflects such excitement. Turning now to Pudsey’s reading of Shakespeare, we can observe further habits that may have been the product of his education. He tends to home in on lines spoken by characters whom he perceives as authority figures, with results that to a modern reader may appear odd, even absurd. For instance, of his forty extracts from Much Ado About Nothing eight are taken from speeches by the Prince, Don Pedro, and three from Leonato, the Governor of Messina. Only four come from the witty Beatrice, and in two of these she is responding to Don Pedro. One, for instance, is the phrase ‘my harte keepes on the windy side of care’, which is taken from this exchange: don pedro In faith, lady, you have a merry heart. beatrice Yea, my lord, I thank it, poor fool, it keeps on the windy side of care. (MA 2.1.287–9) There is just one instance in Pudsey’s extracts from Much Ado in which he appears to reveal a deeply personal engagement with the text. This has been missed hitherto because of a misreading by Richard Savage.43 Here Pudsey has adapted a discussion between Claudio and Leonato concerning ‘a pretty jest your daughter told us of ’: leonato O, when she had writ it, and was reading it over, she found ‘Benedick’ and ‘Beatrice’ between the sheet? (MA 2.3.136–8) This appears in Pudsey’s notebook as ‘writ a letter of a sheet of paper & found E&H between the sheetes’. From this I conjecture that at the time when he was reading Much Ado, perhaps soon after the publication of the first quarto in 1600, Edward Pudsey was attracted to a woman whose first name began with ‘H’. Perhaps he had sent her a love letter, or was thinking about doing so. His marriage to Edith Faban did not take place until 15 February 1605, five years later.

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Pudsey’s copious extracts from Hamlet accord with many of the practices described.44 For instance, he likes admonitions addressed to women. Polonius’s lines to Ophelia at 1.3.104–6 are presented as a universal adage: ‘Maids must not take tenders for true paye’. He also relishes misogynistic generalizations. This prompts him to excerpt part of Hamlet’s onslaught on Ophelia and her sex in the ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ scene and to present it thus: God hath given yow one face & you make yowr selfe another yow gig & amble, & yow list yow nickname gods creatures, & make yowr wantonness ignoraunce.45 He also likes allusions to female desire, whether at its height or in its decline. Comments by Hamlet on his mother exemplify both: ‘She wold hange on him as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on &c.’ 46 Later, in her chamber, Hamlet’s lines at your age The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble And waits upon the judgement are rendered as prose: ‘At your age the heyday in the blood is tame, & humble, waits upon the judgment.’ 47 Pudsey’s practice of reducing verse to prose is even more striking in his extended extract from Marcellus’s speech in the play’s opening scene describing the disappearance of the Ghost from the battlements at dawn. First Shakespeare: It faded on the crowing of the cock. Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long, And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm . . . (Ham 1.1.156–62) Now Pudsey: ‘Against that tyme wherein our saviours birth is celebrated the cock singeth al night long; then no spirits dare stir

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abroad, the nights bee wholesome; no planets ffayres or witches hurt.’ This is an efficient summary of the lines quoted above, and reflects the interest in supernatural apparitions also in evidence in one of the Nashe extracts quoted above. But if we didn’t already know that it derives from a passage of verse this would not be entirely apparent. Elsewhere, however, Pudsey was responsive to blank verse rhythms, and decided to replicate them. His favourite passages in Hamlet were Polonius’s speeches of advice. By removing them from their narrative and dramatic context he filtered out any hint that the speaker may be both tedious and sinister. This is what he makes of Polonius’s advice to Laertes: Give thy thoughts no tong nor any unproportion’d thought his act, familiar but not vulgar, those frendes thou hast & their adoption tried grapple them unto thy soule with hoopes of steele, But do not dull thy palme with entertainment. Beware of enterance into a quarrel but being in beare it so that the opposed may beware of thee, give every man thy eare but few thy voice take eache mans censure but reserve thy judgment.48 This is the longest of Pudsey’s extracts from Hamlet. He seems to have admired the passage so much that just for once he recorded a partial version of its blank verse rhythms, even though his practice of cramming extracts tightly on to the page required him to write it out as a solid block of text. His awareness of metre is shown in his addition of a medial syllable to ‘entrance’ – ‘enterance’. This creates a perfect iambic pentameter from ‘Beware’ to ‘quarrel’, though one that does not correspond with the lineation of either of the early printed texts. An alternative possibility is that ‘enterance’ is what he heard an actor say. The wider issue of whether Pudsey’s Hamlet extracts derive, entirely or in part, from playgoing rather than from reading, deserves to be more fully explored. The memorization of witty phrases heard in the theatre was a well-known and widespread practice. In The Guls Horne-booke

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(1609) Thomas Dekker gave satirical advice about ‘How a Gallant should behave himselfe in a Play-house’. He should pay handsomely for the best and most conspicuous position in the theatre, preferably ‘on the very Rushes where the Commedy is to daunce’, so that his expensive clothes can be admired. He should arrive at the very last minute, and if he has some quarrel with the ‘writer’ – who may have satirized the gallant or his like, just as Dekker himself is doing – he should make a conspicuous exit well before the play’s conclusion. Above all, he is advised to ‘hoord up the finest play-scraps you can get, uppon which your leane wit may most savourly feede, for want of other stuffe, when the Arcadian and Euphuizd gentlewomen have their tongues sharpened to set upon you’ (sig. E4v). By memorizing lines heard in the playhouse, Dekker suggests, these wealthy but foolish young men can seek to hold their own in conversation with ladies who are deeply versed in such elegant pieces of writing as Sidney’s Arcadia and Lyly’s Euphues. Well-born young gentlemen’s practice of gathering quotations from the playhouses is also satirized by Ben Jonson, for instance in the character of Matheo in Every Man In his Humour who (among much else) quotes four lines from The Spanish Tragedy.49 In Shakespeare’s own 2 Henry IV the swaggering Ancient Pistol speaks largely in mangled quotations from swashbuckling plays of the late 1580s.50 There is little doubt that in the case of Othello Pudsey’s notes derive from witnessing a performance. The case of Hamlet is more perplexing. As we have seen, some of Pudsey’s extracts are quite long. If they were based on notes made in the playhouse he had a remarkably good memory, and/or saw the play more than once, and/or reinforced his playhouse jottings with consultation of a printed text. Certain extracts make me suspect that he did witness a performance of Hamlet, even though he probably also consulted a copy of Q2. The first example is a jotting so brief that it may have served as an aide-memoire to recall an especially striking scene, rather than furnishing a witticism or truism. From these lines addressed by Hamlet to his companions –

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Still am I called – unhand me, gentlemen – By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me! I say away! Go on! I’ll follow thee. (1.4.84–6) – Pudsey extracts just two words, ‘unhand mee’, possibly to remind himself of a memorable piece of stage action in which, in his desperate determination to pursue the Ghost, Hamlet started fighting hand-to-hand with his companions, the scuffle bringing all of them close to the precipitous edge of the stage platform. Alternatively or additionally, Pudsey may have been alert to a new usage: this is the OED’s earliest example of the verb ‘unhand’.51 Two further extracts also suggest that Pudsey may occasionally have been drawing on memories of a performance. The first is extremely strange. Though quoted in print, it has never been fully explained.52 It runs: ‘The sunne breedes mag Bewtified Lady gotes in a dead dog being a \good/ kissing carrion’. In the original, Hamlet addresses Polonius in terms that are riddlingly offensive: ‘For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion – have you a daughter?’ (2.2.178–9). Earlier in the scene Polonius has been discussing Hamlet’s courtship of his daughter with the King and Queen, and has read out an impounded love-letter: ‘To the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia – that’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase, “beautified” is a vile phrase’ (2.2.108–9). This passage may, I think, have carried an in-joke for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and one that Pudsey, as a close reader of the works of Nashe, was probably in a position to ‘get’. In 1593 Nashe had dedicated Christs teares over Jerusalem to Elizabeth Carey, wife of Sir George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, who had become Lord Chamberlain in April 1597. Nashe’s epistle opens with these extravagant words: ‘TO THE MOST HONO-/RED, AND VERTUOUS BEAU/TIFIED LADIE, THE LADIE / ELIZABETH / CAREY’. I suggest that in a performance seen by Pudsey the actor playing Polonius, who is characterized by a tic of verbal repetition, as Shakespeare’s foolish old men usually are, kept muttering the prince’s ‘vile

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phrase’, continuing to do so now and then even after Hamlet’s entrance. In extracts incorporating lines spoken by two characters Pudsey normally writes the words of subsidiary characters in italics. ‘Bewtified Lady’ – which strictly speaking is a quotation from Nashe rather than from Shakespeare – is italicized. By placing this italicized phrase in the middle of the word ‘maggotes’, Pudsey may be indicating that at this point, in the performance he witnessed, two characters were speaking at the same time. Hamlet interrogated Polonius about the sexual vulnerability of his daughter, while at the same time Polonius came out with one of his muttered iterations of the ‘vile phrase’ that he had mocked in the heading of Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia. My final example of a ‘Pudsey’ reading that could reflect contact with performance derives from the opening scene of Act 5, in which Hamlet returns from England to find a grave being dug. Rather ploddingly, Pudsey records an observation from the first gravedigger’s exchange with one of his companions: ‘Adam the first gentleman because he furst bore arms’,53 giving no indication that in context this is a punning witticism. Pudsey’s next extract is much more interesting: ‘This age is grown so witty worded that the toe of the pesant comes so neere the heele of the courtier he galles his kibe.’54 This is based on Hamlet’s comment to Horatio on the ‘absolute’, or pedantic, answers of the gravedigger, who tells him, in response to close interrogation, that the deceased is neither a man nor a woman, though she ‘was a woman, sir, but rest her soul she’s dead’. There is no equivalent speech in Q1. In both Q2 and F the equivalent of Pudsey’s ‘witty worded’ is ‘picked’, which has never been satisfactorily glossed, though it is assumed from its context to mean ‘refined, finical’. It seems to me possible that ‘witty worded’ – a phrase that does not seem to occur anywhere else in Elizabethan literature – is actually what Pudsey heard Hamlet/Burbage say. The meaning of the phrase is self-evident: humble artisans are so clever with words nowadays that they can even keep a scholar-prince on his toes. It seems possible that ‘witty worded’ is actually the ‘correct’ reading, which somehow got garbled into ‘picked’ when this unusually

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long playtext reached the printing-house. It should at least be included among the textual collations in future editions of the play. The great length of Hamlet may have been a problem for Pudsey. His copious extracts end three hundred lines short of the play’s conclusion, which is surprising, given his evident fascination with the text. I am tempted to wonder whether he followed the practice satirized by Dekker and left the playhouse shortly before the end, giving the rest of the audience one last flash of his brightly coloured stockings.

iii. william reynolds, reader Now for something completely different. The response of the paranoid soldier William Reynolds to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) was anything but conventional.55 While Edward Pudsey only once reveals a close personal engagement with Shakespeare’s text, in the ‘E&H’ substitution discussed above (p. 77), Reynolds believed that both he and the Queen were vividly represented in Shakespeare’s poem.56 With demented tunnel-vision, he views her imagined courtship of him as the poem’s chief raison d’être. The poet’s name, which appears at the end of the dedicatory epistle, may have meant nothing to him. By his own account, Reynolds was a keen attender of sermons, being sometimes transported with astonishing mystical visions while in church. Two ‘preachers’ named in Reynolds’s few surviving letters – just eight from an output once numbering hundreds – ‘Master Phillips’ and ‘Master Egerton’, were both puritans.57 Reynolds often boasts about his avoidance of the dual temptations of dice and drink. It seems unlikely that he ever attended a public playhouse. It was probably the name of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, rather than that of William Shakespeare, that caught the attention of Reynolds. Seven years later, in a letter to Robert Cecil reporting on the aftermath of Essex’s ‘rising’, Reynolds described Southampton’s unbecoming behaviour while he was part of the military campaign in Ireland in 1599. South-

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ampton showed great favour to one Piers Edmunds, to whom he gave lavish rewards. Edmunds ‘ate and drank at his table and lay in his tent . . . the Earl Southampton would clip and hug him in his arms and play wantonly with him.’58 Back in 1593 Reynolds was obsessed with the power, greed and corrupt practices of Robert Cecil’s father William, the Queen’s Lord Treasurer. He observed him as closely as he could, listening attentively to hostile gossip about him. Indeed, it may have been because of what Reynolds reported about himself that Burghley preserved these letters. The following report is contained in a letter addressed to the Queen herself, in which he also alludes to an earlier letter he has sent to her: As in my letter to your Majesty enclosed in my Lord Bishop’s of London, I wrote of the covetousness of your Council, especially your Lord Treasurer, who robbing you he robs your subjects, and in robbing your subjects he robs you. And although he tell you what great sums of money he pays forth for your Highness’ affairs, yet he nor nobody tells you what huge sums of money he stores up for his children. I chanced to go into a shop in London last week where men were talking of my Lord Treasurer. Says one of them, ‘he will leave his children worldly treasure enough if they can hold it fast.’ ‘And he will give them worldly instructions,’ says another; ‘I marvel what religion my Lord Treasurer is of,’ swearing by God’s blood, ‘no man in England can judge or tell.’ Those men were strangers to me, and the shop also, but that I cheapened a thing59 there. Reynolds was no doubt aware that the young Earl of Southampton was one of the Lord Treasurer’s wards, a connection that lent force to his belief that Venus and Adonis was published by the wish of the Queen’s closest advisers. Reynolds’s characteristic response to printed books needs to be explained. His peculiar conviction was that certain books had been published not merely with the permission of the Queen’s

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Privy Council, but at their express command. The three books that can be identified as alluded to in the 1593 letters all focus on the Queen, at least in Reynolds’s eyes. The one to which he alludes most frequently, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), was published anonymously, with a dedication to Lord Burghley by the printer and publisher Richard Field. It is now generally believed to be by George Puttenham. But the absence of an author’s name, combined with the dedication to Lord Burghley, helped to fuel Reynolds’s conviction that it reflected the views of the more sinister members of the Privy Council. Its frontispiece, a splendid woodcut portrait of the Queen, combined with many examples of eulogy of the monarch, could also be construed as evidence that she is the book’s essential subject. In a long letter addressed to the Lords of the Council on 21 September 1593, the second of the three he wrote that day, Reynolds makes his general response quite clear: ‘By your devices and printing of books you pretend great good to me, as though if I could come to the Queen then you would do wonders for me.’ He goes on to offer a specific example: Also in a book that she walked in the fields to seek me so disguised that her own knew her not. I think so indeed, for she was so disguised that I knew her not either. If your meaning had been to help me to some reward, had you no means but such mocks? This alludes to a passage in the Arte exemplifying ‘Periphrasis, or the Figure of ambage’, ‘holding somewhat of the dissembler, by reason of a secret intent not appearing by the words.’ Puttenham illustrates this in a quatrain written by himself about Elizabeth: Whom Princes serve, and Realmes obay, And greatest of Bryton kings begot: She came abroade even yesterday, When such as saw her, knew her not.60 Reynolds’s active imagination has substituted ‘the fields’ for ‘abroade’, adding the self-obsessed statement that she came out

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‘to seek me’, making the Queen sound like an amorous nymph in a pastoral romance. This typifies the intensely interactive quality of Reynolds’s reading. Having received no direct replies to the many letters that he has written and delivered in recent years both to the Queen herself, to members of her Privy Council, and to other authority figures such as the Bishop of London and Burghley’s secretary Walter Cope, Reynolds persuades himself that veiled responses to his petitions are to be found, instead, in printed books. He is entirely confident of his own moral probity and entitlement to speak the truth as he sees it, and to request a substantial reward for his loyal military service in the West Indies, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Spells of imprisonment in the Marshalsea, the Fleet, the Tower and Newgate have done nothing to shake this confidence. They have served only to intensify his paranoid conviction that certain councillors, especially Burghley, have villainous designs on his life. Complaints about printed books were a regular theme of his letters: ‘have I not written in many of my letters that I took your books for deep mischiefs?’ His oft-repeated allegation is that these books promise him great rewards if only he will come into the Queen’s presence. But he knows that these apparent invitations are just tricks and traps. The third and longest of the three letters dated 21 September 1593 contains the most detailed account of such books: I threaten to make all their evil doings publicly known, whereby they pretend to have a great care to help me, as though they would seem to marvel much why I come not a-wooing to the Queen, seeing they have taken such great pains to paint out her rare virtues and admirable beauty, in one book entitled A wonder deciphered upon the 12 of the Revelation wherein the author says who is more like to be the mother of that child than Queen Elizabeth, which is spiritually meant of the doctrine of the 12 apostles and their successors, which should beget the Catholic Church [i.e. Christ’s] mystical body . . .

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Reynolds is especially irked that this piece of triumphalist and apocalyptic theology – A Marvell, Deciphered, by Edward Hellwis – has been printed, because it is exactly the kind of thing that he writes himself, without receiving any response or reward: ‘And although my letters and visions have the same sense and signification, yet they turn & take them as they list to merry jests.’ Hellwis’s book certainly enjoyed powerful patronage, being dedicated to Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain and a member of her Privy Council. Hellwis alludes in his ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ to ‘your Honours received favour’, expressing the hope that both his book and himself ‘may jointlie be received into your Honour’s favourable protection’. From Hellwis’s visionary tract Reynolds moves swiftly on to two further allusions to the Arte of English Poesie. These allegedly illustrate the Privy Council’s practice of perverting eulogies of the Queen into ‘merry jests’ devised with the aim of mocking Reynolds: Else in another book they describe a queen’s particular gifts of nature, as her crystal eyes and ivory teeth, her red cheeks and cherry lips, and also a riddle of a maiden, which has a thing, and rough it is, and in the midst a hole i-wis, there came a young man of his gin, and he did thrust a handful in. The first allusion is to Puttenham’s account of ‘Resemblance by imagerie’, in which he again quotes from one of his own poems in praise of the Queen, a blazon of Elizabeth’s physical beauties. It concludes: Her bosom sleake as Paris plaster, Helde up two balles of alabaster, Eche byas was a little cherrie: Or els I thinke a strawberie.61 I have quoted this clumsy stanza because it suggests the distinction that Reynolds draws between legitimate eulogy of the Queen, such as that of Hellwis, who identifies her with the

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‘woman clothed with the sun’ in the Book of Revelation, and the unseemly ‘merry jests’ about her royal person apparently favoured by members of her Privy Council. The second allusion in the Reynolds passage quoted above is to Puttenham’s account of ‘Enigma, or the Riddle’: My mother had an old woman in her nurserie, who in the winter nights would put us forth many prety ridles whereof this is one: I have a thing and rough it is And in the midst a hole Iwis: There came a yong man with his ginne, And he put a handful in. The good old Gentlewoman would tell us that were children how it was meant by a furd gloove. Some other naughtie body would peradventure have construed it not halfe so mannerly.62 Reynolds’s quotation of this ostensibly obscene riddle is virtually word-perfect, except that he attributes it not to ‘an old woman’ but to a ‘maiden’, who speaks in propria persona. He also improves the scansion of the fourth line. For Reynolds, the riddle seems to have exemplified his enemies’ dirty-mindedness, which associates the Queen herself with bawdy jests, riddles and fantasies. He continues, without a pause, to describe Shakespeare’s poem, strongly implying that this too is bawdy: Also within these few days there is another book made, of Venus and Adonis, wherein the Queen represents the person of Venus, which Queen is in great love (forsooth) with Adonis, and greatly desires to kiss him, and she woos him most entirely, telling him although she be old, yet she is lusty, fresh and moist (I believe a good ell more than a bushel full) and she can trip it lightly as a fairy nymph upon the sands, and her footsteps not seen, and much ado with red and white. But Adonis regarded her not, wherefore she condemns him for unkindness. Those books63 are mingled with other stuff to dazzle the matter.

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Reynolds anticipated this account, almost certainly with Shakespeare’s poem already in mind, in the letter he wrote on the same day addressed to the Queen herself. Imploring her for the umpteenth time for his ‘suit’ for £12 as a military pension, or else for a lump sum sufficient to enable him to arm himself and provide himself with a horse, he says: But you will not give it me except I come to you, for you will have some sport for your money. By God, I swear I have heard many say you are a merry wench, and a very pleasant gentlewoman, full of pretty conceits. But you are so incredulous that I cannot tell what to say to you. And for love, why, you are Venus herself, even a god of love. He appears to use the word ‘incredulous’ in a now obsolete sense of ‘not to be believed’, suggesting that she is untrustworthy, perhaps even a cruel tease. Reynolds may have been mistaken in claiming, on 21 September 1593, that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis had been published ‘within these few days’. An elderly teller of the Exchequer, Richard Stonley, recorded buying a copy of the book three months earlier, on 12 June.64 But it is possible that there was a second printing in 1593 of which all exemplars have disappeared – only a single exemplar survives of the first printing. However, this mistake, if it was one, is as nothing compared with Reynolds’s conviction that ‘the Queen represents the person of Venus’. The term ‘represents’, or ‘presents’, was often used to refer to theatrical performance.65 It seems that Reynolds finds the Queen, thinly disguised as Venus, to be vividly portrayed in the poem as being passionately in love with Adonis/Reynolds. But his scornful ‘forsooth’ indicates that he knows that this is a feint. In lines 115–16 – ‘Touch but my lips with those fair lips of thine – Though mine be not so fair, yet are they red . . . ’ – Shakespeare initiates both Venus’s desire to kiss Adonis and what Reynolds aptly describes as ‘much ado with red and white’.

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Shakespeare’s Venus does not admit to being old. Indeed, she explicitly denies it: ‘Were I hard-favoured, foul, or wrinkled-old . . . Then mightst thou pause, for then I were not for thee . . .’ (133–7) But Reynolds perhaps construed these lines as an acknowledgment that in truth Venus/Elizabeth is old, but just doesn’t look it. At this date Elizabeth was a couple of weeks into her sixty-first year. Reynolds seems to have found Venus’s evocation of her own physical lustiness, or juiciness, quite erotic: ‘My beauty as the spring doth yearly grow, My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning . . .’ (141–2) He comes closest to full quotation in his citation of these lines: ‘Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear, Or, like a fairy, trip upon the green, Or, like a nymph, with long dishevelled hair, Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen . . .’ (145–8) Reynolds doesn’t mention Adonis’s death. The tragedy for him appears to be only that he ‘regarded her not’ – that is, that Adonis did not love Venus. He may not have read the whole poem fully, seeing such later episodes as Adonis’s departure, Venus’s colloquies with Night and Death, and Adonis’s death and metamorphosis into a flower as examples of irrelevant ‘other stuff ’ inserted by the order of the Privy Council ‘to dazzle the matter’. He is only really interested in passages that seem to allude to the Queen’s supposed desire for him to come into her presence so that she can mock him in person. Reynolds’s reading is sui generis. Though fascinating in its uniquely florid obsessions, it cannot be regarded as typical of contemporary responses either to Venus and Adonis or to Shake-

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speare’s writings in general. Yet there is just one way in which his response may not have been wide of the mark. In taking Venus and Adonis as his prime example of a book reflecting the views of the Privy Council he identified it as a courtly work, linked, via its patron Southampton, to the Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, and so, via Lord Burghley, to the Queen herself. Reynolds associated the book, and therefore, by implication, the poet who ‘made’ it, with power and high status. Such an association would have been welcomed by Shakespeare himself, for it conformed with his personal determination to transform his public image from that of an ‘upstart crow’ to that of a bird of more gentle lineage.

THREE POET AND GENTLEMAN

i. were my worth greater Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness. (Epistle prefaced to The Rape of Lucrece , 1594)

It is unlikely that Shakespeare was personally acquainted with the three individuals whose responses to his writings were discussed in the previous chapter. Yet from the early 1590s he knew that his literary profile was rising. Indeed, he took deliberate steps to ensure that it rose further. As Muriel Bradbrook pointed out as long ago as 1962, ‘To appear in print was to make a dignified bid for Fame; the author at once achieved recognition and respectful notice, even among those who despised, or affected to despise, the work of the common stages.’1 In the case of publicly performed plays, such as the Henry VI trilogy and Titus, popular success was apparent from playhouse takings, audience response and repeat performance, though only a minority of playgoers were aware of the name of the poet whose hand had been most active in composing them. Fewer still, perhaps, were aware that this same poet performed leading roles in some of the plays that he wrote. As Bradbrook also observed, many discerning individuals avoided and ‘despised . . . the work of the common stages’. However, during the severe 1592 plague outbreak, with the public theatres closed, Thomas Nashe wrote an eloquent defence of playgoing as a wholesome remedy against sloth, greatly preferable to most of the alternative afternoon recreations such as drinking,

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gambling and whoring. This was echoed twenty years later in one of the items prefaced to Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors, the player Richard Perkins’s chatty verses ‘To my loving Friend and Fellow, Thomas Heywood’: Thou that do’st raile at me for seeing a play, How would’st thou have me spend my idle houres? Wouldst have me in a Taverne drinke all day?2 As his key example of the power of good drama to foster patriotism and heroism Nashe chose the play later known as 1 Henry VI: How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.3 As Andrew Gurr has observed, ‘Nobody before Nashe was ever quite so eloquent about the power drama had to move public emotions.’4 But Nashe’s eloquence focuses on the affective skill of the performer, or ‘Tragedian’, rather than that of the writer whose words the actor performed. Nashe does not say whether he was aware of this play’s authorship. However, he may have been, not least because there is a strong probability that he himself was a co-author with Shakespeare.5 Indeed, he may have chosen the scene of Talbot’s death to exemplify the affective power of heroic drama precisely because it was one that he himself had written.6 But readers of Pierce Penilesse not aware of the play’s multiple authorship would not gather it here, for it is players, not playwrights, whom Nashe singles out for special praise: ‘Tarlton, Ned Allen, Knell, Bentlie’. Some day he hopes to immortalize the names of these great English performers, just as great as those celebrated in ‘France, Spaine, and Italie’, by describing ‘the manner of theyre habites and attyre’ in each role that he played.7 Had

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such an account survived it would have provided a marvellous record for theatre historians. Nashe’s celebration of the heroism of John Talbot as reenacted on stage yields only an oblique and questionable tribute to the writing of Shakespeare. Early readers of Pierce Penilesse in 1592/3, such as Edward Pudsey (see above, p. 75), may not have known the identity of this play’s authors. However, Shakespeare’s own narrative poems, Venus and Adonis, published and printed by Shakespeare’s Stratford coeval Richard Field in the spring of 1593, and The Rape of Lucrece, published by Field in the early summer of 1594, were a different matter. They highlighted both the identity of the up-and-coming poet and his high aspirations. Each carried a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and each was signed ‘William Shakespeare’. These epistles were his earliest public acknowledgements of literary authorship.8 It is in this sense that he described Venus as ‘the first heir of my invention’. It was by no means the first product of his brain and pen. Shakespeare had already contributed to half a dozen or more plays, as co-author or alone. But Venus and Adonis was the first work to go out into the world openly bearing his name, like a first-born legitimate child. The poems’ success was immediate. The first printing of Venus and Adonis sold out speedily, and the survival of only one exemplar indicates that the book was not merely bought, but avidly read. Frequent lending-out and thumbing of copies led to the physical disappearance of virtually the whole print-run. As suggested above (p. 89), a second printing in the late summer of 1593 may have disappeared altogether. Though crazy in his interpretations of the speech and actions of others, William Reynolds is generally, as Leslie Hotson observed, perfectly reliable on mundane matters of date and location.9 His statement on 21 September 1593 that Venus and Adonis had been published ‘within these few days’ suggests both that there was a second printing at this time to meet overwhelming popular demand and that the first had sold out so quickly as to have escaped Reynolds’s notice. Shakespeare would not have gained any financial reward from

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this, or any subsequent reprintings. Yet he knew that because of the poem’s popular success his own name, together with many lines and phrases from the poem, was now on everyone’s lips. Thomas Edwards’s tribute to Shakespeare as ‘Adonis’ has already been discussed (see Chapter 1). Since Edwards’s Narcissus was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 22 October 1593 this may be among the earliest literary allusions to the poem. It was quickly followed by Michael Drayton’s mimicry of phrases from the poem in his Peirs Gaveston (autumn 1593).10 In May 1594 the youthful Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris, heavily influenced by Venus and Adonis, was registered with the Stationers.11 More privately, Shakespeare must have received an excellent reward from Southampton for dedicating Venus to him. Otherwise, despite his public promise to honour him further ‘with some graver labour’, he would not have dedicated the second to him as well. But I think Andrew Murphy may take too narrow a view in claiming that The motivation for dedicating the poem to Southampton would have been largely mercenary. Shakespeare – the largest segment of his income cut off as a result of the shut-down of the theatres – would have hoped for a financial reward for his dedication.12 As I see it, honour, as well as cash, was his goal. Perhaps the financial reward from his patron was not that staggering sum of £1,000 allegedly reported by Sir William Davenant.13 Yet given Southampton’s well-attested lavishness during these years, it could possibly have been as much as £100. It is virtually certain that the poet immediately used part of his reward for Venus to settle his father’s many debts, for suits against John Shakespeare cease entirely after the spring of 1593. As Robert Bearman has shown in fine detail, abundant records of John Shakespeare’s ‘indebtedness’ began in 1578 with his mortgage of some of the property that had come to him on marriage to Mary Arden.14 There were actions against him for recovery of debt in 1586 and again in 1587. In 1591 he pursued one Robert Jones for

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a debt while at the same time being himself pursued for the recovery of debts by three other Stratford men, Adrian Quiney, son of his friend Richard; Humphrey Plumley, mercer; and Richard Hill, a former bailiff. In 1592 John Shakespeare’s name appeared in two lists of individuals in Warwickshire who are described as having failed to attend church monthly as required, and in the second he was specifically placed among those described as failing to attend church for fear of ‘process’ – that is, being arrested by a sergeant for the purpose of debt-collection.15 However, according to the always punctilious Bearman, ‘A suit against [John Shakespeare] in the court of record, running from January to March 1593, is the last record we have suggesting that he was in any financial difficulty.’ Soon after this date his debts must finally have been settled. The obvious explanation for this unusual phenomenon is that John Shakespeare was baled out by his high-earning eldest son. Bearman himself favours this explanation. Elizabethans often fell into severe debt, but rarely extricated themselves from it without major interventions by others. Restoring his father to a position of substance and ‘hability’ (that is, to economic strength) was in part a filial duty. But it was also the first step that William took towards (re-)establishing the gentle status of the sadly undervalued Shakespeares of Henley Street. It is the dedicatory epistle to the second poem, The Rape of Lucrece, that most clearly suggests the close connection Shakespeare saw between skilful literary invention and consequent social advancement: To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done, is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have,

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devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness. Your lordship’s in all duty, William Shakespeare. Double ‘honour’ pertains to his young patron, an ‘Honourable . . . Earl’ by virtue of his birth who is known also to be ‘honourable’ by nature, or in ‘disposition’. Southampton’s possession of two distinct kinds of ‘honour’ – social eminence and generous behaviour – causes the poet to be confident that his highly wrought and lengthy narrative poem, downplayed as a ‘pamphlet without beginning’, is ‘assured of acceptance’. However, as he goes on to say, ‘Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater’. This does not, I think, imply that a better poem would show greater devotion to the patron, but rather that the very same poem would show ‘greater’ devotion if the writer were of higher status. We should remember that in this period immediate connections were made between social rank and literary achievement. Sidney, for instance, rated the Earl of Surrey highly as a poet chiefly because he felt that his aristocratic rank was aptly reflected in what he wrote, not because he invented both English blank verse and the ‘English’ form of the sonnet. He found ‘in the Earl of Surrey’s lyrics many things tasting of a noble birth, and worthy of a noble mind’.16 It is true that Sidney’s larger purpose in the Defence of Poesy was to show that the composition and patronage of poetry are compatible with enjoying high rank and/or holding high office in the commonwealth, especially as an adviser to the monarch. But even theorists who took a broader approach than Sidney’s were likewise inclined to equate poetic worth with high social status on the part of the writer. This is illustrated almost comically in the posthumous elevation of both Chaucer and Gower to the rank of knight, a status that neither enjoyed when alive. Commenting on ‘the most commended writers in our English Poesie’, George Puttenham declared that ‘those of

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the first age were Chaucer and Gower, both of them as I suppose Knightes’.17 William Webbe, in his Discourse of English poetrie (1586), also reported that The first of our English Poets that I have heard of, was John Gower, about the time of king Rychard the seconde, as it should seeme by certayne conjectures bothe a Knighte, and questionlesse a singuler well learned man.18 Chaucer’s knighthood was endorsed by some of the Elizabethan heralds. For instance, the coat of arms of ‘Sir Geffrey Chaucer the Poet’, with a crest of a gloved hand holding a quill pen, is illustrated in a collection made originally by William Smith, Rouge Dragon Poursuivant (c. 1550–1618).19 Chaucer was indeed an armigerous gentleman. This is affirmed in the coat of arms displayed on his (late) monument in Westminster Abbey. But there is no reason to believe that he was ever knighted. Nowadays we may view both Puttenham’s supposition and Webbe’s ‘certayne conjectures’ that England’s two most celebrated poets must have been knights as slightly comic. But his earliest readers would not have laughed, especially if they were themselves talented poets of modest social status. Shakespeare knew that his writings would be more highly esteemed, and would therefore pay a more meaningful tribute to the discernment of his patron(s), if his own social status were higher. In the autumn of 1592, stung by the Groatsworth attack, the brilliant but ‘untutored’ poet was painfully aware that he could not achieve honour through academic learning. He was already approaching thirty, and a combination of economically restricted circumstances and early marriage had denied him any possibility of attending a university in his late teens, as his fellow playwrights Peele, Marlowe, Greene and Nashe had all been lucky enough to do. Yet he could still hope to achieve gentle status through a combination of patronage and economic sufficiency. Shakespeare’s young patron had especially close links with the honours system as it stood in the late Elizabethan period. His great-great-uncle, Sir Thomas Wriothesley (d. 1534), became

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Garter King of Arms. He played a key role in shaping the administration of the College of Arms in the Tudor period, and was responsible for building Garter House in Barbican Street, where he had his own studio for the preparation of heraldic rolls and other documents.20 It was he who changed the form of the family surname from ‘Writhe’ to the grander and much less pronounceable ‘Wriothesley’. He appears in person, identified by his title, ‘Garter’, in the final scene of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII. The scene opens with his prayer for the ‘prosperous life, long and ever happy’ of the newly christened infant Elizabeth, future Queen. Thomas Wriothesley’s brother William, the great-grandfather of Shakespeare’s young patron, held the office of York Herald. The Writhes/Wriothesleys were not merely a family which achieved noble status under the Tudors, but one which exercised considerable influence over the administration of honours. Both of the poems and their dedicatory epistles were carefully designed to support Shakespeare’s development as a writer whose works deserved to be admired and be taken seriously despite his yeoman status and lack of higher education. Two external factors acted as catalysts to Shakespeare’s upward climb in the mid-1590s. The first, discussed in Chapter 1, was the public attack made on him by Henry Chettle in Greenes Groatsworth. Despite Chettle’s semi-retraction in Kind-Harts Dreame, a retraction complicated by Chettle’s refusal to acknowledge that he himself was largely responsible for the offending passage, Shakespeare continued to smart from the public account of him as an over-exposed and inappropriately ambitious ‘upstart crow’ who was also in several senses a plagiarist or mimic. As a player who wore the borrowed ‘feathers’ of his profession he delivered words written by others. He had allegedly received as his own acclaim which was more properly due to the Universityeducated men whose speeches he delivered. But worse than that, he ‘supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you’. It was a further blow that Greenes Groatsworth was reprinted, without modification, in 1596. I shall discuss this in the next section. Essentially, as we can see from our distance in

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time, Chettle’s attack – which may reflect views genuinely aired by a dying and embittered Greene – was informed by simple envy that one man should be so extremely talented both as a performer and as a writer. He won plaudits for delivering speeches composed by ‘scholars’, and also expanded and improved their work. Because of these multiple gifts he was in a position to earn more money than those who were either simply poets or simply players. As received by Shakespeare in the autumn of 1592 Chettle’s mean-spirited attack could not be easily shrugged off. The second external circumstance that shaped Shakespeare’s literary and social career path in the early 1590s was the severe and prolonged recurrence of plague in the City of London. At several moments between September 1592 and May 1594 it seemed quite possible that the London playhouses would never again reopen for long enough to be reliably profitable. In response to this severe threat Shakespeare made a radical change of direction. Rather than writing and performing in plays for popular audiences, he composed elegant poems for courtly patrons and discerning book-buyers. In order to make a long-term success of this different literary career, given his lack of status as a ‘scholar’, or university alumnus, he needed to establish himself as a respectable figure, who could impress himself as such on major patrons. Had the London playhouses not reopened in the summer of 1594 I surmise that Shakespeare would have embarked on even more substantial and ambitious non-dramatic poems, with the composition of plays for the theatres, and possibly also of masques for private performance, only a secondary activity. His literary career would then have paralleled that of his Warwickshire coeval Michael Drayton, a prolific playwright and poet who successfully cultivated a large number of courtly patrons, wrote ambitious non-dramatic poems, and achieved the status of an ‘Esquire’, a rank a notch higher than that of ‘Gentleman’. We may speculate as to whether creating a large body of non-dramatic poetry, however brilliant, would have won Shakespeare the enduring esteem that he enjoys today.

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ii. a falcon, his winges displayed And for his Creast or Cognizance a falcon his winges displayed Argent standing on a wrethe of his Coullours suppo[rtinge] A Speare Gould steeled as aforesaid sett uppon a helmet. (College of Arms Shakespeare Draft B) 21

Many early modern writers poured scorn on the idea that a talented citizen could legitimately achieve gentle status through purchase of a patent. By the 1590s the dubiousness of such procedures was already a stock theme for comedy. Among themes for ‘merriments’, or comic set-pieces,22 celebrated by Nashe for their effective delivery of corrective social satire is one described as buying Armes of the Herald, who gives them the Lyon, without tongue, tayle, or tallents, because his maister whome hee must serve is a Townesman, and a man of peace, and must not keepe any quarrelling beasts to annoy his honest neighbours.23 This seems remarkably analogous to the case under discussion. When the award of arms to John Shakespeare was challenged by Ralph Brooke it was defended by Dethick on the grounds that ‘the person to whom it was granted hath some magistracy and was Justice of peace at Stratford upon Avon’.24 As Nashe’s account implies, not everyone thought that being a worthy citizen who had held local offices such as that of Justice of the Peace, and had sufficient money to buy arms, provided adequate grounds for being awarded gentle status. However, other pundits not only acknowledged that the purchase of arms was a widespread practice, but defended it as a perfectly acceptable one. One such was Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577), whose treatise De Republica Anglorum was written in the early 1560s, though not published until 1583. In his chapter on ‘Gentlemen’ Smith remarked that whereas the higher honours – knighthoods and above – were normally awarded only by the monarch, men whose economic and social status enabled them to live in a ‘gentlemanly’ style could legitimately seek to be recognized as such:

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(and if neede be) a king of Heraulds shal also give him for mony, armes newly made and invented, the title whereof shall pretende to have beene founde by the said Herauld in perusing and viewing of olde registers, where his auncestors in times past had bin recorded to beare the same.25 Smith was aware that some authorities might object to ‘this manner of making gentlemen’. Yet he himself thinks it perfectly acceptable: I am of that opinion that it is not amiss. For first the prince looseth nothing by it . . . In any shew or muster or other particular charge of the towne where he is, he [the new made gentleman] must open his purse wider, and augment his portion above others, or else he doth diminish his reputation. Smith (a social Darwinian) envisages a natural levelling-off process ensuring that individuals or families who have attained gentle status on insufficient grounds will decline from that status if they lack the skills and resources to maintain it: So that no man hath hurt by it but he himselfe, who hereby perchance will beare a bigger saile than he is able to maintaine. For as touching the policie and goverment of the common wealth, it is not those that have to do with it, which will magnifie them selves, and goe in higher buskins than their estate will beare: but they which are to be appointed, are persons tryed and well knowen.26 No ‘mushroom’ gentleman, he suggests, whose descendants are unable to maintain the standard of living appropriate to that rank, will be appointed to a position of authority in the commonwealth. Therefore no harm will ensue from the occasional unmerited and over-ambitiously purchased elevation. This kind of cynical endorsement of the proliferation of honours is among practices that have caused some modern historians of heraldry to describe

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the ‘late and post-Tudor’ period as one of ‘decadence’.27 In this period Kings of Arms frequently endorsed aspirations towards elevated rank, rather than questioning or limiting them. The years following the successful publication of Lucrece were exceptionally fertile for Shakespeare. Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream were all probably written in the course of 1594–5, and The Merchant of Venice seems to belong to the summer of 1596. Shakespeare’s prominence and popularity were far greater than they had been at the time of the pseudonymous attack on him by Chettle back in 1592. Perhaps for this very reason the attack was now renewed. On Thursday, 20 October 1596, just four years after the first printing of Greenes Groatsworth, Richard Olive acquired the right to have it printed by Thomas Creed. On the same day, and as part of the same transaction, Olive acquired the right to print Chettle’s Kind-Harts Dreame, along with a third, apparently unconnected book, Nicholas Breton’s The wil of wit, of which the earliest surviving edition is of 1597. The combination of Greenes Groatsworth with Kind-Harts Dreame suggests that the libellous element of the first book, along with Chettle’s confused apology for it in the second, was of continued interest, perhaps even enhanced, given Shakespeare’s now higher profile. Groatsworth is distinguished from the other items, for an unusual phrase is included with reference to it: ‘Entred for Richard Oliffes Copie GREENES groates of witt printed by John Danter. And Thomas creede from tyme to tyme to print this book for Richard Oliffe.’ 28 The unusual phrase here is ‘from tyme to tyme’, which suggests open-ended permission for Groatsworth to be reprinted in the future, presumably in response to popular demand. This book with its roots in Greene’s much mythologized death on 2 September 1592 was apparently still marketable in 1596 and likely to be so for some time to come. The day when the second edition of Groatsworth was registered with the Stationers, with that unusually permissive clause, was also in other ways a significant one in the life of William Shakespeare. It was on this same day, 20 October 1596, that two

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draft patents were drawn up under the authority of William Dethick, Garter King of Arms, for a particularly splendid coat of arms for Shakespeare’s father John. This extraordinary coincidence does not seem to have been observed before. Perhaps it is not a coincidence. Could Shakespeare have got wind of Richard Olive’s plan to reprint the attack on himself as an ‘upstart Crow’, and may this have lent immediate urgency to his determination to elevate (or, supposedly, restore) the Shakespeares of Henley Street to armigerous status? Such a scenario might explain the apparent oddity of his acquiring a grant of arms only a few months after the death of his eleven-year-old son Hamnet, the only male heir, apart from his unmarried younger brothers, who could have carried on the name and visible honour. Perhaps it was personal honour in his own lifetime with which Shakespeare was most intensely preoccupied, rather than that of his heirs. Certainly, as we shall see, it is striking that the crest above the coat of arms figured a bird with especially noble connotations. Elizabethan London was physically compact, and news travelled fast. There are two men who might plausibly have warned Shakespeare about the imminent reappearance in London bookshops of the 1592 attack. The first, and perhaps more likely, is the printer John Danter. It was he who had originally printed the second half of the book, containing that offensive Epistle to divers plaimakers.29 He must have been deeply familiar with the text. The man responsible for its publication in 1592 had been the London bookseller William Wright, and it was presumably he who sold rights in it to Richard Olive. Tellingly, perhaps, he seems to have tried to erase himself from the record. As Carroll points out, either ‘Wright did not own it [i.e. Groatsworth], or else did not want to acknowledge ownership’.30 His name does not appear in the 1596 transfer of rights. Danter, a notoriously close follower of literary gossip, had nothing to lose by warning Shakespeare about the imminent reappearance of Groatsworth, and might even have had something to gain. The curious emphasis, in the Stationers’ Register entry, on Thomas Creede as the book’s exclusive printer firmly eliminated Danter from the production

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process, and he may have felt sore about this. It may be relevant here both that Danter was to print the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet in 1597, and that there is some mystery about how he acquired the text.31 The plot thickens yet further. Two good scholars, Sidney Thomas in 1950, and John Jowett in 1998, have suggested both that Henry Chettle assisted Danter and Allde in the printing of Romeo and Juliet, and that he may have been the author of the charming scene 9, mostly in rhyming couplets, in which the lovers meet and plight their troth in Friar Laurence’s cell.32 Fully untangling what was going on here is beyond me. But I shall return to Henry Chettle, and his continued envy/emulation of Shakespeare, in Chapter 5. The other man who might have warned Shakespeare of the imminent reappearance of the libel is John Danter’s quondam lodger Thomas Nashe, with whom he was so closely associated that Gabriel Harvey sought to insult him by describing him as ‘Danters gentleman’.33 It was Danter who in 1596, probably in the summer, printed Nashe’s comic tour de force Have with you to Saffron-walden, OR, Gabriell Harveys Hunt is up. As already mentioned, there is little doubt that in 1591/2 Shakespeare had collaborated with Nashe (plus one or two others) in composing the play now known as 1 Henry VI. Shakespeare and Nashe may also have been closely associated with each other during the preparation and performance of Summers last will and testament in the autumn of 1592, both before and after the death of Greene. Nashe and Shakespeare were clearly acquaintances, and they may for a while have been very friendly. A further possibility is that Nashe and Danter, even closer friends, jointly sought out Shakespeare on 20 October to warn him of the forthcoming republication of Groatsworth. If Shakespeare’s decision to establish his family’s armigerous status was triggered by the reappearance of the ‘upstart Crow’ attack, the most telling element of the patent was the crest, rather than the ‘coat’, or shield. Crests were not integral to arms, and could be changed or modified by family members in later generations. However, they were often their most conspicuous and

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distinctive feature. Shakespeare’s own association of honour above all with crest rather than coat is suggested in a climactic passage in the ‘Temple Garden’ scene in 1 Henry VI. This scene is generally agreed to be Shakespeare’s own. Somerset impugns the nobility of William de la Pole, Earl Suffolk, describing him as a ‘yeoman’. Warwick (the ‘King-Maker’) is immediately inflamed to fury by this allegation: Now, by God’s will, thou wrong’st him, Somerset: His grandfather was Lionel, Duke of Clarence, Third son to the third Edward, King of England. Spring crestless yeomen from so deep a root? (2.4.82–5) Until the autumn of 1596 Shakespeare himself had been a ‘crestless yeoman’, and keenly aware of that fact. While the ‘coat’ or shield assigned to (John) Shakespeare was quite plain – and as such, rather ancient-looking – the crest was striking, presenting a boldly confident image of its younger bearer. Unlike the crow, a bird with extremely disagreeable connotations, freely killed by farmers, the falcon was explicitly associated with chivalry and with aristocratic recreation. In Chaucer’s courtly debate poem The Parliament of Fowls birds of prey rank highest among orders of birds, and the order of birds of prey is headed by ‘The gentyl faucon, that with his feet distrayneth / The kinges hand’.34 In heraldry, a silver falcon had lofty associations. The coat of arms of Shakespeare’s young patron the Earl of Southampton included four silver falcons on a blue ground. At various times both Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth I used a silver falcon as their ‘badge’, ‘a heraldic device associated with but independent of arm and crest, used for personal adornment and as a mark on property’.35 Provided that a gentleman’s coat of arms was sufficiently differentiated from all others, it was legitimate to include images that figured in royal arms. Nevertheless, the use of such a motif by a glover’s son was fairly audacious. The examples displayed by the Earls of Southampton, Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I showed falcons in profile with their wings

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Fig. 4. Original design of Shakespeare’s coat of arms (1596).

closed. In contrast, in the crest designed for the Shakespeares of Henley Street, the silver falcon faces the viewer and is volant: flying, or about to take flight. It appears to perform the movement known to falconers as ‘the shaking’, in which the bird opens its wings wide and shakes them just before taking off into the air. The spear that figures both on the coat and the crest suggests readiness to take on all challengers. A falcon that performs ‘the shaking’ while holding a tall spear, or lance, in its right claw offered a proudly punning enactment of the name ‘Shakespeare’. It was combative as well as punning, for the ‘shaking’ of a spear normally signified military aggression and/or military triumph. The latter is its application in a passage in Peele’s play Edward I that has been read as an allusion to Shakespeare as a performer in the play: elinor Now brave John Balioll Lord of Gallaway, And king of Scots shine with thy goulden head, Shake thy speres in honour of his name, Under whose roialtie thou wearst the same.36

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F.G. Fleay’s suggestion that these lines indicate that the part of Edward I was performed by Shakespeare has received little support. But Brian Vickers’s strong case for Peele as the senior partner in the composition of Titus Andronicus (see Chapter 2, p. 58) means that all apparent links between Shakespeare and Peele should now be pondered with some thought. The design of the lance has a further expressive feature. In both of the 1596 sketches the silver point of the spear appears to be scored in the middle in a manner strongly resembling the incised nib of a pen. It is unlikely that the poet’s barely literate father would have commissioned such an image. Putting all these parts together, the implication is that the younger ‘Shake-speare’ is of high rank, and well able to defend himself, should his honour be impugned, whether with weapon or pen. Once he was legally a gentleman, Shakespeare was entitled to carry a sword, and he undoubtedly availed himself of this privilege. One of the more straightforward bequests in his will was ‘to Master Thomas Combe my Sword’. Thomas Combe, nephew and heir to John Combe, was probably Stratford’s wealthiest citizen, as his uncle had been. Though Schoenbaum describes this sword as a ‘keepsake’, implying that it was no more than an item of bric-a-brac, it was probably a splendid and ornate one, which the young Stratford gallant may have kept well polished and worn publicly as a visible reminder of his friendship with the local poet and gentleman.37 Should further demonstration of the legitimacy of the Shakespeare grant be required, it was provided by the motto, ‘Non sanz droict’, or ‘Not without right’. However, as Schoenbaum and others have pointed out, the clerk’s two false shots at writing the motto, with a comma after ‘Non’, had the unfortunate effect of reversing its meaning, suggesting ‘No, [these arms are displayed] without right’.38 These have been scored through, and the clerk’s third attempt, in capitals and with no punctuation, ‘non sanz droict’, presumably represents what was intended and licensed. But as Schoenbaum also observed, there is no evidence that the motto was ever used. It does not appear either on the monument

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in Holy Trinity, Stratford, or in the examples of Shakespeare’s arms in heraldic manuscripts. One reason for the omission of the motto may have been Jonson’s mockery of it in Every Man Out of his Humour (1599), in which the country bumpkin Sogliardo purchases a wildly over-elaborate coat of arms showing a boar’s head, and with the motto ‘Not without Mustard’.39 Those who were recognized as gentlemen owed duties of service to the commonwealth from which the commonwealth benefited both in peace and war. If an individual or family who had acquired arms by purchase proved unable to meet such obligations their status would decline. This was what had allegedly happened to the forebears of John Shakespeare, who had been recognized as gentlemen at the beginning of the Tudor dynasty. Ancestors of his, it was claimed in the draft patent drawn up in the College of Arms, ‘were for theyr valieant & faithfull service advaunced & rewarded by the most Prudent Prince King Henry the seventh of famous memorie’.40 Diligent searches have failed to identify any man named Shakespeare who was rewarded by Henry VII, or did him faithful service. Allusions to Henry VII were a formulaic feature of such patents in the Elizabethan period. It would be thrilling to imagine a Warwickshire forebear of the poet’s fighting against Richard III at the battle of Bosworth, perhaps under the Stanleys, whose last-minute support for Henry Tudor made his victory possible. But it is rather unlikely. And although the draft continues, after the passage just quoted, to assert that the Shakespeares of Stratford-upon-Avon ‘have continued at those partes in good reputacion & credit’, it was evident that this status had of late failed to be recognized. Otherwise, a grant such as the one in process of being prepared would not have been required. In practice, it was the rising economic strength and burgeoning social connections of John’s eldest son that provided a basis for (re-)establishing the family’s armigerous status. As quoted above (p. 102), Sir Thomas Smith reported that such claims were often based on ‘invented’ evidence supposedly deriving from ‘olde registers’, and this I take it was the case with the Shakespeare claim.

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When Ralph Brooke raised objections to the Shakespeare coat of arms as licensed by William Dethick in 1596 it was not primarily because they had been acquired by purchase, but on the grounds that the coat itself belonged to another and much more ancient and distinguished family, that of Mauley, honoured by King John, albeit one whose line was now extinct.41 It seems that there was also a suggestion of insufficient social and economic status and lineage, since the defence of the patent went on to state that John Shakespeare ‘was a magistrat in Stratford upon Avon a Justice of peace he maryed the A Daughter and heyre of Ardern and was of good substance and habilitie’.42 The general category assembled by the quarrelsome Brooke was apparently of ‘mean persons’ to whom Dethick had wrongly awarded patents of gentility. Of the twenty-three alleged instances of wrong awards about half relate primarily to ‘coats’ that, according to Brooke, properly belonged to much older and better families, while the other half were awarded to individuals whose economic and social status was allegedly insufficient. In a few instances, of which John Shakespeare’s is one, both objections are in play. According to a note at the end of the second 1596 draft patent ‘this John’ had previously sought a grant from Robert Cooke, Clarenceux Herald, twenty ‘years past’. This may or may not be true. Certainly in the early 1570s John Shakespeare’s financial difficulties had not yet become severe, though they were soon to do so. If he did seek a grant, it probably was at least twenty years earlier. But as awarded in the autumn of 1596 there seems little doubt that the Shakespeare coat of arms, crest and motto were as desired and largely designed by John’s eldest son. It is clear that Shakespeare was intensely interested in heraldic and chivalric imagery, and known to be skilful in devising it. The scene of the tournament at Pentapolis in Pericles (2.2), jointly written by Shakespeare with George Wilkins, shows a procession of six knights, each with a shield adorned with a symbolic image and motto. And early in 1613 Shakespeare and Burbage were each paid forty-four shillings ‘in gold’ for devising and painting a tilting-shield for Francis Manners, 6th Earl of Rutland.43

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Back in 1596, the family surname made the choice of a spear, or lance, an obvious one for the ‘charge’, or pictorial image. But it is doubtful whether the barely literate John would have commissioned an image of a lance whose silvered tip so strongly resembles the incised nib of a pen. In both surviving drafts this detail is especially noticeable in the case of the spear that forms part of the crest, held upright in its right claw by a silver falcon whose ‘displayed’, or widely spread, wings enact the movement known as ‘the shaking’. The black stripe, or ‘bend sable’, on to which the golden spear, silver-tipped, was laid as a ‘charge’, served as the perfect foil to set off its brilliance, as well as that of the gold background. It would require considerable outlay on gold and silver foil every time the coat was reproduced. No man in search of a coat of arms is likely to be in a modest mood. But even allowing for this, these are not the accoutrements of a modest man. Apart from the black stripe, this coat is entirely covered with gold and silver. The hateful image of a black and presumptuous ‘upstart Crow’ was now officially replaced with a bird of noble, even royal connotations. However, as Shakespeare’s Feste was to observe, ‘the whirligig of time brings in his revenges’ (TN 5.1.369–70). For many decades the sculptured falcon, with wings ‘displayed’, that crowns Shakespeare’s monument in Holy Trinity, Stratford, has been pitch black. It’s high time it was resilvered. Some time in 1599 Shakespeare attempted to reinforce the family’s armigerous status further, this time with the support of William Camden, who had just been appointed Clarenceux King of Arms, as well as of ‘Garter’ Dethick. The draft that survives, dated only by year, testifies to the preparation of a licence to display, or to ‘impale’, additional arms derived from the poet’s mother, Mary Arden, ‘one of the heyrs of Robert Arden of Welling Cote’ [= Wilmcote]. She was, however, Robert Arden’s eighth and youngest daughter. The accompanying sketches record, first, a ‘fess checky’, or gold and azure checked horizontal stripe, ‘the coat of the Ardens of Park Hall, Warwickshire’. This has been vigorously scored out, and another sketch of a half-shield

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shows, instead, ‘Gules, three cross-crosslets fitchy gold, and on a gold chief a martlet gules’.44 This derived from a more ancient and eminent Arden family who were feudally connected to the Beauchamps, arguably the most distinguished family in Warwickshire. In heraldry, however, the ‘martlet’ was associated with descent from a fourth or younger son who inherited his father’s honour but had no claim to any land. That was the symbolism of the bird’s lack of feet, which also reflected the zoological attributes of the martlet, or swift, which is never seen to land on the ground. However, no impalement of the Shakespeare arms with ‘Arden’ appears on the coat of arms that forms part of the Shakespeare monument in Holy Trinity, Stratford. Nevertheless, the coat of arms awarded by Dethick in 1596 was effectively recognized. For instance, an image of it was included, alongside Michael Drayton’s even more explicitly ‘literary’ coat of arms, in a manuscript collection originating in the early 1600s. The first section consists chiefly of grants of arms made by William Dethick’s successor as Garter King of Arms, the more distinguished and honourable William Segar.45 Segar may have known Shakespeare; he was certainly acquainted with Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Davies of Hereford.46 Shakespeare and Drayton, two Warwickshire poets of yeoman stock, both included images of upward flight in their coats of arms, in Drayton’s case the flying horse Pegasus, in Shakespeare’s the falcon volant. Symbolically, however, Shakespeare’s highflying wings were somewhat clipped. In the Segar collection the falcon’s wings are not shown fully extended, as in the College of Arms drafts, but only slightly opened, and in semi-profile. This reductive treatment was taken even further in the malicious Ralph Brooke’s sketch of the arms awarded to ‘Shakespear the Player by Garter’, which shows an emaciated falcon with its beak open and its wings, in profile, extended behind its back.47 As we shall see in the next section, attempts to cut the high-flying playerpoet down to size were to continue throughout his active career.

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iii. companion for a king Had’st thou not plaid some Kingly parts in sport, Thou hadst bin a companion for a King; And, beene a King among the meaner sort. (John Davies of Hereford, The Scourge of Folly, 1611)

Attacks on plays, players and playhouses have frequently been discussed in modern times, as have literary defences of them, such as those of Thomas Lodge (c. 1579) and Thomas Heywood (printed 1612, written 1607–8). Less well-known is the debate embedded within this broader controversy which specifically concerns the social status of the player, and the question of whether, and if so, to what extent, outstandingly talented players should be publicly honoured. As early as 1569 Henry Cornelius Agrippa (as translated by James Sanford) put forward the harsh view that to exercise this Arte, is not onely a dishonest and wicked occupation, but also to behold it . . . there was in times paste no name more infamous then stage players, and moreover, al they that had plaide an Enterlude in the Theaters, were by the lawes deprived from all honour.48 But for Shakespeare’s purposes, the debate sprang to topical life in Robert Greene’s Francesco’s Fortunes: Or the second part of Greenes Never Too Late (1590). This seems to be a seminal work that Shakespeare perused closely at a time when his own incipient career as a player/playwright/poet was approaching a critical moment. Greene’s romance included suggestions for the subject matter of those substantial narrative poems with which Shakespeare was to lay the foundation stones of his own social advancement, as well as a personal life-story that in several ways paralleled and anticipated his own. It also included lively comments on the social status of players. Shakespeare’s highly original treatment of the classical myth of Venus and Adonis, in which Venus passionately woos the mortal youth, but the youth, perhaps still a child, resolutely

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resists her seduction strategies, was anticipated in Francesco’s Fortunes. The courtesan Infida sings an alluring song performed as if by the goddess Venus to a sulky and reluctant Adonis: Sweet Adon, darst not glaunce thine eye . . . Upon thy Venus that must die . . . Wilt thou let thy Venus die . . . Adon were unkinde say I . . . The narrative concerning Francesco’s deserted wife Isabel shows her as an English equivalent of Lucrece. Like the Roman Lucretia, she is forcefully wooed by a man of high rank who gains entrance to her bed chamber while she sleeps. When she wakes up the elderly burgomaster Bernardo offers her large sums of money to have sex with him. Like Prince Tarquin, he threatens to destroy her reputation if she refuses. He intends to bribe ‘some Ruffian in the citie to sweare . . . he hath lien with thee’. Unlike Lucrece, however, Isabel is not raped, but imprisoned, and then put on trial for alleged unchastity. Her courage and moral integrity are so apparent when she defends herself in court that the witness suborned by the lustful Bernardo immediately repents and confesses his calumny, and her chastity is publicly vindicated. Though Greene makes no explicit allusion to parallels between the story of Isabel and that of Lucrece, these will have been obvious to any Elizabethan reader. For instance, when her husband Francesco at last returns unexpectedly, Isabel is found, as Lucretia was when her husband and his friends visited her unexpectedly, virtuously employed ‘at worke in her chamber’. A passage of more personal interest to Shakespeare occurs earlier on in Francesco’s Fortunes. Having succumbed to the wiles of the courtesan Infida, the prodigal Francesco finds himself in a desperate plight: ‘his purse was cleane emptie, his score great, and his hostesse would trust him for no more money, but threatned him, if present payment were not made, to lay him in prison.’ Luckily, however, he remembers that he is a ‘scholler’, with considerable fluency in language. Just at this moment

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he fell in amongst a companie of Players, who perswaded him to trie his wit in writing of Comedies, Tragedies or Pastorals, and if he could performe any thing worth the stage, then they would largely reward him for his paines. He speedily composes a comedy, ‘which so generally pleased all the audience, that happie were those Actors in short time that could get any of his workes, he grewe so exquisite in that facultie.’ Greene was patently using ‘Francesco’s’ life-story to draw attention to his own increasingly prolific and lucrative career as a playwright. In the early 1590s Shakespeare may have responded to this as an encouragement to himself. Like Greene/Francesco, Shakespeare was living apart from his family, and beginning to make money by working for and with playing companies. The painful life-story of the Englishman Francesco – disguised as a palmer, or pilgrim – is narrated to a select company in a house in Bergamo, in Northern Italy. The account of his remarkable success in writing for players prompts an extended digression in which Francesco explores the merits of ‘Playes, Playmakers and Players’. He describes the origins of ‘comedies’ in Athens. These were in high public esteem because ‘under the covert of such pleasant and Comicall events, they aymed at the overthrowe of many vanities that then raigned in the Citie’. In Rome, too, the comedies of Plautus and Terence had high moral aims, which served to elevate the status of those who performed them: Now, so highlie were Comedies esteemed in those daies, that men of great honor and grave account were the Actors, the Senate and the Consuls continuallie present, as auditors at all such sports, rewarding the Author with rich rewards, according to the excellencie of the Comedie. In his extended historical account of drama Francesco strongly supports the honouring of both of playwrights and players, with reference to ancient examples:

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Thus sir have you heard my opinion briefly of plaies, that Menander devised them for the suppressing of vanities . . . the play makers worthy of honour for their Arte: & players, men deserving both prayse and profite, as long as they wax neither covetous nor insolent. The Host declares himself convinced: ‘I have caused you sir (quoth the gentleman) to make a large digression, but you have resolved me in a matter that I long doubted of.’ But the company are eager for the next instalment of Francesco’s personal history, so there is no further discussion of plays and players. As suggested by the digression in Francesco’s Fortunes, the question of whether outstanding actors could or should be publicly honoured was already topical, and essentially unresolved, at the outset of Shakespeare’s career as a player-poet. The issue was to become even more problematic and confused as his career approached its final phase. Though not published until 1612, Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors appears to have been written circa 1608, the beginning of yet another period of two years during which the public playhouses were closed because of plague.49 Heywood was a lifelong admirer of the writings of Shakespeare, as evidenced in his earliest published poem, Oenone and Paris, heavily influenced by Venus and Adonis. In a muchdiscussed epistle ‘To my approved good Friend Mr. Nicholas Okes’ appended to the Apology he expressed fury with the publisher William Jaggard on finding that some of his own recent poems had been published alongside two of Shakespeare’s, and attributed to Shakespeare, ‘which may put the world in opinion I might steale them from him’. Though Heywood does not mention Shakespeare by name, he indicates that he greatly admires him, and has some personal acquaintance with him – ‘the Author I know much offended with Master Jaggard (that altogether unknowne to him) presumed to make so bold with his name’. Heywood probably had Shakespeare and Burbage prominently in mind in his account of living players who are highly respectable citizens: ‘Many amongst us, I know, to be of substance, of gov-

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ernment, of sober lives, and temperate carriages, house-keepers, and contributary to all duties enjoyned them.’50 Heywood may have been privy to the humiliating disappointments suffered by both Shakespeare and Burbage soon after the accession of James VI and I. It was at this time that Shakespeare’s status rose yet further. But once again it was almost immediately called in question. Unlike his predecessor, James was notoriously lavish with honours. This was manifested in the hundreds of knighthoods that he bestowed in the earliest months and years of his reign. This became a running joke in plays of the period. In Middleton’s Michaelmas Term, for instance, a play performed by the Paul’s Boys in 1605–6, a Scot recently arrived in London asks a clutch of gallants, ‘Are you not knights yet, gentlemen?’ When he is told, ‘Not yet,’ he says, ‘No, that must be looked into; ’tis your own fault.’51 The implication, in an interrogation of London gallants by a young Scot, is that absolutely any young gentleman about town could win the King’s favour if only he put his mind to it. James was also lavish with other forms of favour. As is well known, within weeks of his accession he adopted the company previously known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men as his very own King’s Men, with Shakespeare and Burbage as its leading members. They were assigned red cloth to wear as their livery as royal servants, and in August 1604 the company was paid £21 22s. for their attendance on the Spanish delegation in residence for eighteen days at Somerset House. Although Andrew Gurr has claimed that ‘They presented no plays’, this seems to me unlikely, for what else but theatrical entertainment could a company of players provide during their attendance on the Spanish grandees?52 Disappointingly, however, no record of their entertainments appears to survive. But as we shall see, the company’s leading men, Shakespeare and Burbage, appear to have been considered for further honour and elevation around this time. Sonnets 110–12, in which the speaker laments his self-exposure as a ‘motley’ player, have already been cited and discussed (Chapter 1, pp. 27–8). These three sonnets fall within a larger group, 104–26, which MacD.P. Jackson has convincingly assigned to the

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early Jacobean period on the basis of rare-word links with Shakespeare’s plays.53 External references appear to shed further light on what was going on. The poet and writing-master John Davies of Hereford three times alludes to a disappointment suffered by Shakespeare soon after the accession of James I. These passages suggest that a well-established career as a leading player on public stages prevented both him and his friend and colleague Richard Burbage from receiving a major promotion which, in Davies’s view, they merited. Davies’s Microcosmos (1603) is an encyclopaedic poem describing and celebrating the little world of England for the benefit of her newly arrived Scottish King. The passage in question occurs within a larger discussion of Pride: Players, I love yee, and your Qualitie, As ye are Men, that pass time not abus’d: And some I love for painting, poesie, And say fell Fortune cannot be excus’d, That hath for better uses you refus’d: Wit, Courage, good shape, good partes, and all good, As long as these goods are no worse us’d, And though the stage doth staine pure gentle bloud, Yet generous yee are in minde and moode.54 Like Chettle in 1592 (see above, p. 44), Davies uses the correct technical term, ‘quality’, to describe the profession of ‘playing’. His own favourite ‘Players’ are identified in a marginal note as ‘W.S.’ and ‘R.B.’, that is, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage. It is not for acting alone that they are celebrated, for each has a further skill, in Burbage’s case ‘painting’, and in Shakespeare’s, ‘poesie’, or literary composition. Davies’s next marginal note cites the aphorism of Simonides linking the arts of painting and poesy, which further underlines the close relationship between two players of exceptional gifts who are both colleagues on stage and also, off stage, practitioners of sister arts. In a phrase resembling lines 1–4 of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111, Davies blames ‘fell Fortune’ for debarring both men from ‘better

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uses’. This suggests not merely an honour, but some sort of office or attendance at court that would either qualify for such an honour, or would be an essential component of it. Both men are gifted in mind, spirit and physique, and both, despite the stigma or ‘staine’ of the stage, are true ‘gentlemen’. The Latin word generosus, here anglicized as ‘generous’, was the regular legal term for a ‘gentleman’. As Davies surely knew, both men were now armigerous. As already discussed, Shakespeare’s father’s grant of arms had been awarded by Garter King of Arms, William Dethick, in 1596. Its legitimacy had been seriously challenged by the ill-natured Ralph Brooke, but with Camden, and possibly also Segar, as his champions, Shakespeare’s status was supported by eminent members of the College of Arms. Burbage’s arms may have been obtained from one of the painter-stainers in the Strand who supplied coats of arms more cheaply than the Heralds, or he may even have devised and painted them himself. In the marginal note on this line, cued to the word ‘generous’, Davies compares these players with the ‘honest’ and talented Roman actor Roscius: ‘Roscius was said for his excellency in his quality, to be onely worthie to come on the stage, and for his honesty, to be more worthy then to come theron.’ This recalls the praise bestowed on Shakespeare by Henry Chettle in Kind-Harts Dreame (1592) after he had learned from persons of ‘worship’ about the player’s ‘uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty’. Though the son of a slave, Roscius was awarded a generous annuity by the Senate, and his skills were allegedly admired and envied both by the orator Cicero and by the mighty Julius Caesar, himself an occasional amateur actor. Davies goes on to celebrate the didactic function of plays in ridiculing vice and upholding virtue, and to contrast the deservedly high status of such gifted stage-players as W.S. and R.B. with the shallow skills of minor musicians and bagpipers. A more glancing allusion occurs in Davies’s poem Humours Heav’n on Earth (1609), retrospective moral reflections, from the viewpoint of the current period of plague, on the 1603–4 plague

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outbreak. Here Davies discusses the impact of the vagaries of Fortune on the unworthy and the worthy. Some unworthy men are raised too high by fickle Fortune, only to be thrust down again: ‘Yet some she guerdond not, to their desarts’. Once again a marginal note refers to W.S. and R.B. Davies’s third and apparently most revealing allusion concerns Shakespeare alone. His collection of epigrams The Scourge of Folly (1611) includes a laudatory poem addressed ‘To our English Terence Mr. Will. Shake-speare’: Some say (good Will) which I, in sport, do sing Had’st thou not plaid some Kingly parts in sport, Thou hadst bin a companion for a King; And, beene a King among the meaner sort. Some others raile; but, raile as they thinke fit, Thou hast no rayling, but, a raigning Wit: And honesty thou sow’st, which they do reape; So, to increase their Stocke which they do keepe. This falls within a group of poems praising men who are personally known to Davies. Epigrams 155 and 156 are addressed to his friends Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson; 157 is to Inigo Jones, ‘our English Zeuxis and Vitruvius’, and 175 is to Davies’s ‘right-well-deserving friend Mr. John Speed’. Though Shakespeare is not explicitly described by Davies as a ‘friend’, his use of the possessive ‘our’, combined with the comradely form of address, ‘good Will’, suggests that Shakespeare too may have been a personal acquaintance of Davies’s. Yet again, for the third time in eight years, Davies suggested in print that Shakespeare had missed well-deserved advancement because of his active profession as a player. As a leading member of the King’s Men, along with Burbage, he was already in a broad sense a ‘companion for a King’. Legally, it was as ‘his Majesties Groomes of the Chamber and Players’ that Shakespeare, Burbage and their fellows had been paid for eighteen days of attendance on the Spanish peace delegates at Somerset House in August 1604. The company’s sharers continued to enjoy the status of ‘grooms

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of the chamber’. But it appears that Shakespeare and Burbage, the company’s two leading members, had been considered for some further advancement. Had it not been for the stigma of the stage, perhaps, Shakespeare in particular might have been lifted yet further into the hierarchy of the court. In lines 5–6 of the epigram quoted Davies contrasts Shakespeare’s ‘wit’ with the ‘rayling’ of other writers, hinting also that such writers rail enviously against Shakespeare himself. But these writers fall short of Shakespeare’s quasi-royal pre-eminence, his ‘raigning Wit’. Davies may be thinking of satirical playwrights such as Jonson, Marston and Dekker. In the closing couplet he celebrates Shakespeare’s moral as well as literary supremacy. ‘Honesty’ is a plant whose seed-pods look like coins. Shakespeare’s ‘honesty’ is such that he freely scatters the products of his superabundant wit for others, including those contemporary ‘rayling writers’, to gather and appropriate as their own. What was the advancement that Shakespeare and Burbage missed? One answer is suggested by two more early Jacobean texts. The first is the anonymous Ratseis Ghost, published by Valentine Simmes at the end of May 1605, the second of two pamphlets about the confidence trickster Gamaliel Ratsey. Though many of its anecdotes are evidently fictional, Ratsey was a historical person, a young gentleman from Market Deeping, in Lincolnshire, who turned to the bad when he returned to England after military service in Ireland. He belonged to the same broad social group as William Reynolds, that of young men who had seen active military service but found themselves, on return to civilian life, without either occupation or financial support. After a crime spree lasting about eighteen months Ratsey was convicted of highway robbery. He was publicly hanged in Bedford on 25 March 1605. The first exploit described in Ratseis Ghost is ‘A pretty prancke passed by Ratsey, upon certaine Players that he met by chance in an Inne’. Ratsey treated the players lavishly, paying them for a special private performance at the inn. About a week later Ratsey, now disguised with a wig and beard, once again met these players

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at an inn. This time they claimed to be the servants of a different nobleman from the one they previously named as their patron. Once again Ratsey ‘heard their Play’, and he rewarded them for their performance at the high city rate of forty shillings. But after they had left the inn Ratsey rode after them and overtook them on the road, where he extracted all their money from them with violent menaces – not just his own forty shillings, but the company’s entire savings – supposedly as a punishment for their betrayal of their true patron. The episode shows Ratsey to be a more accomplished actor than the professionals, since his disguise has worked so effectively to his advantage.55 But the point of the narrative seems to be not so much to itemize Ratsey’s villainies as to use him as a mouthpiece for knowledgeable reflections on the current condition of drama in England. On first encountering the players Ratsey delivers a speech to them about the excessive ambitions of many players: For some of you, not content to do well, but striving to over-doe and go beyond your selves, oftentimes (by S.George) mar all . . . Others there are whom Fortune hath so wel favoured, that what by penny-sparing and long practise of playing, are growne so wealthy, that they have expected to be knighted, or at least to be conjunct in authority, and to sit with men of great worship, on the Bench of Justice. This suggests that certain players, perhaps in provincial companies, sought to become local magistrates or Justices of the Peace. After he has taken away all their money Ratsey pretends to take the company under his own personal protection for the coming week. He singles out the leading man, now under his ‘patronage’, in order to give him some satirical advice: And for you sirra (saies hee to the chiefest of them) thou hast a good presence upon a stage, me thinks thou darkenst thy merite by playing in the country. Get thee to London, for if one man were dead, they will have

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much neede of such a one as thou art . . . my conceipt is such of thee, that I durst venture all the mony in my purse on thy head, to play Hamlet with him for a wager . . . and when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place or Lordship in the Country, that growing weary of playing, thy mony may there bring thee to dignitie and reputation: then thou needest care for no man, nor not for them that before made thee prowd with speaking their words upon the Stage. There are allusions here both to Burbage and to Shakespeare, the former well known as performer of the title-role of Hamlet, the latter as originator of the play’s ‘words’. Finally, Ratsey makes the player kneel down, and pretends to ennoble him: ‘Rise up Sir Simon two shares and a halfe: Thou art now one of my Knights, and the first Knight that ever was Player in England.’56 In Shakespeare’s Impact on his Contemporaries (1982) E.A.J. Honigmann suggested that the passage about the leading player mockingly ‘knighted’ by Ratsey alludes to Shakespeare.57 I agree, but I think the allusion is indirect and rather complex. The player himself cannot be modelled on Shakespeare, for he is a second-rate perfor mer with a mediocre, provincial and currently patronless company. No one could seriously suppose such a man to be able to match, still less outdo Burbage in the notoriously demanding role of Hamlet. Ratsey, a discerning critic, enjoyed the nameless company’s instrumental music, but thought little of their play. It is also apparent that ‘Sir Simon two shares and a halfe ’ is no writer, only a pushy performer of words composed by others. He is cruelly taunted by Ratsey with the ironic suggestion that if Shakespeare, a player of modest provincial origins, could get rich in London, invest in country property, and finally aspire to knighthood, then so can he. Ratsey adds this sarcastic insult to the injury of depriving the vagabond players of their entire ‘stocke’ of money. Read in conjunction with Davies’s allusions, these passages suggest that in the early years of James’s reign both Shakespeare, the author of Hamlet, and Burbage, the brilliant performer of the

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play’s hero, were being spoken of as aspiring to knighthood. A passage spotted by Andrew Gurr corroborates such a rumour. In Act 1, scene 2 of The Woman Hater, performed at the Blackfriars in 1606, Francis Beaumont has the Count speak of ‘fine sights at Court’: you shall see many legges too; amongst the rest you shall behould one payre, the feete of which, were in times past sockelesse, but are now through the change of time . . . very strangely become the legges of a Knight and a Courtier: another payre you shall see, that were heire apparent legges to a Glover, these legges hope shortly to bee honourable. Gurr has suggested that Such an allusion to the eldest son (‘heire apparent’) of a glover, the trade of Shakespeare’s father, matched with the pun on ‘sockelesse’, someone now wearing the comedian’s sock, could only have pointed to Shakespeare as a King’s Man and therefore in some respect a new courtier.58 However, it seems to me that the allusion is, like the first two made by John Davies, to two King’s Men, not to Shakespeare alone. The first pair of legs, those that sport the comedian’s sock, belong to Richard Burbage, while the second pair, those of a glover’s first-born son, are Shakespeare’s. Nor does Gurr fully explain the Count’s suggestion that ‘these legges hope shortly to bee honourable’. I suggest that Beaumont, like Davies, alludes to rumours that both Burbage and Shakespeare, already leading King’s Men, currently aspire to be knights, with the former possibly already passing himself off as one, at least on stage – a ‘Knight’ as well as a ‘Courtier’. This was not the only time that Beaumont, born into a leading and landed family in Leicestershire, took a potshot at the upwardly mobile Shakespeare. In the Induction to The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1606–7) the grocer’s apprentice Rafe is invited

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to display his acting skill in a ‘huffing part’. To ‘huff ’, in OED’s obsolete sense 4, was ‘To puff or swell with pride or arrogance; to speak arrogantly or insolently; to storm, bluster, “talk big” ’. In response to this request Rafe delivers a slightly mangled version of Hotspur’s speech in 1 Henry IV about his determination to accumulate honour (1.3.200–4): By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac’d moon, Or dive into the bottom of the sea Where never fathom line touched any ground, And pluck up drowned honour from the lake of hell. It is striking that Beaumont chose to typify Shakespeare’s writing by quoting a Pistol-like ‘huffing’ speech expressing determination to procure ‘bright honour’ at any price. Beaumont must have known Shakespeare personally, and may have formed the lofty view that the middle-aged Midlander of yeoman stock had grown too big for his buskins. John Davies of Hereford was an associate both of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and of his brother Philip, young noblemen who enjoyed high favour with the new King. He was well placed to hear rumours at court about impending advancements, such as those imagined by Lear when he is briefly and poignantly reunited with Cordelia. Together in prison, he anticipates that the two of them will hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too – Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out . . . (KL 5.3.13–15) John Davies was exactly the sort of man who could ‘Talk of court news’ in this period. He expressed staunch support for Shakespeare and Burbage in print when their rumoured honours failed to materialize. But in contrast, both the well-connected Francis Beaumont and the unknown author of Ratseis Ghost ridiculed the notion that a stage player could realistically aspire to be a knight.

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By 1609, the plague year that saw the publication both of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and of Davies’s Humors Heav’n on Earth, it was apparent that such promotion was never to be. Though James had bestowed hundreds of knighthoods in the early months of his reign, he may by now have been persuaded that honouring men who were stage players by profession would be unacceptable to most of the nobility. Robert Cecil, as Principal Secretary, would have been likely to offer such advice. It is possible that even those young noblemen, such as Southampton and Pembroke, who especially favoured Shakespeare and his writings, were opposed to such a step. As Earls, they were themselves technically qualified to bestow knighthoods. But if they did so in this instance we should certainly know about it. A further possibility is that rumour inflated the honour that Shakespeare and Burbage missed. There was a rank just below that of knight which could be attained by serving as an attendant to a knight. Shakespeare’s fellow Midlander Michael Drayton became an ‘Esquire’ by exactly this method, being an attendant on his patron Sir Walter Aston when the latter was made a Knight of the Bath on 25 July 1603.59 E.K. Chambers, whose authority should be respected, commented thus on Davies’s three allusions to missed honour: I once fancied that there might have been some talk of making Shakespeare, and perhaps Burbadge, Esquires of the Bath, like Drayton . . . at the Coronation of James. But although there are Companions of the Bath now, they were only introduced into the Order in 1815, and do not represent the old Esquires, who were not so called.60 However, Chambers may have been too cautious here. His comments have deterred later scholars from searching for substance in Davies’s allusions because of the uncertainty of any precise and formal reference in the line ‘Thou hadst bin a companion for a King’. Though it is true that ‘Esquires of the Bath’ were not formally designated ‘Companions of the Bath’ until 1815, there is

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no doubt that the Tudor and Jacobean rituals connected to the making of Knights of the Bath did require that each would-be Knight was attended by two squires. It is certain that it was as such an attendant that Michael Drayton was raised from ‘gentleman’ to ‘esquire’, a rank to which he drew proud attention for the remainder of his relatively long life. In a passage to be discussed in more detail in the next chapter it is alleged that there are former strolling players who ride on horseback, wear satin suits, acquire lands ‘and now Esquiers are namde’.61 This description would not fit Drayton, but there may have been others who had indeed been travelling players yet achieved the rank of ‘esquire’ soon after the accession of James I. The ‘Bath’ ceremonies were associated with major royal occasions. Elizabeth I created eleven Knights of the Bath at her coronation in 1559. But because there were no royal marriages or christenings during her reign she never created any more. She was eventually to outlive all of those whom she had so honoured. But James I more than made up for lost time by creating sixty-two Knights of the Bath in preparation for his coronation. The fullest surviving account of the ceremonies connected to such investitures in the Tudor period relates to the coronation of Mary, and describes the offices performed by the two ‘Esquires’ who attended on each would-be Knight in some detail.62 More than half a century later Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, gave a personal account of his own investiture as a Knight of the Bath before the coronation of James I, which included the attendance of the ‘esquires’ on each knight-to-be: ‘The second day to wear robes of crimson taffety (in which habit I am painted in my study,) and so to ride from St. James’s to Whitehall, with our esquires before us.’63 Further Jacobean royal family occasions providing opportunities for the creation of Knights of the Bath included the investiture of the four-year-old Prince Charles as Duke of York at Whitehall on 6 January 1605, and the installation of Prince Henry as Prince of Wales in the chapel of Durham House in June 1610. There may therefore have been several periods when the possibility of elevating Shakespeare to the rank

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of ‘esquire’ was rumoured. Yet the maturer reflections that ensued after the wild euphoria which accompanied James’s peaceful accession may have made it clear to many in authority, including the King and his closest favourites, that bestowing honour on a man who had appeared as a king on public stages, and was perhaps still doing so, could make the whole ceremony appear ridiculous. To those familiar with his ‘royal’ appearances on stage it might appear that such a man was only ‘acting’ the part of a knight or squire. Paradoxically, the better he performed his part ‘for real’, the more his performance might seem to undermine the authenticity of the whole occasion, or even to ridicule it. Dudley Carleton’s response to the authentic representation of court ceremonial in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s All is True (later known as Henry VIII) suggests that it was over-authentic mimicry of the royal court that led – morally, as well as physically – to the fire that totally destroyed the Globe in 1613 during a performance of that play. From Sonnets 110–12 we may glean some of Shakespeare’s own response to such bitter disappointments. Having ‘gone here and there’, making himself ‘a motley to the view’, has debarred him from life-transforming honours. Had he achieved such an honour – even that of ‘esquire’ rather than ‘knight’ – he would have found himself on a somewhat more equal footing with the young nobleman (or noblemen) to whom most of the sonnets appear to be addressed. A few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, most notably Thomas Heywood, argued that the very best players, especially if they were honourable men in their offstage life, should be publicly honoured. But widespread prejudice against bestowing public honour on players was to persist for nearly three more centuries. It was not until 1885 that the humbly born Henry Irving was to become ‘the first Knight that ever was Player in England’.

FOUR THE RIVAL POETS Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead? No, neither he, nor his compeers by night, Giving him aid, my verse astonished. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 86)

In the preceding chapter I discussed the part played by Shakespeare’s poems, and especially Venus and Adonis, in establishing his status as a significant literary figure and a man in search of personal advancement. There is ample evidence that the poems quickly became popular with a wide reading public, and that The Rape of Lucrece, embodying the poet’s ‘graver labour’ promised in the dedicatory epistle to Venus in 1593, commanded admiration even among learned, eminent and serious-minded readers. The distinction between the two poems, both popular, was made by Gabriel Harvey probably some time in 1600: ‘The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus, & Adonis: but his Lucrece. & his tragedie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, have it in them, to please the wiser sort.’ 1 Given the great success of both Venus and Lucrece, we may wonder why Shakespeare appears never again to have composed a substantial narrative poem. I shall explore this issue towards the end of this chapter. But as MacD.P. Jackson has pointed out in a wonderfully full, probing and original investigation of Shakespeare and his sonnetspeaker’s ‘Rival Poets’, Venus and Adonis did not meet with universal approbation. In particular, the learned George Chapman (1559/60–1634), in his own earliest published poem, The Shadow of Night, appears to condemn Shakespeare’s decision to attach an

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epigraph claiming deep and divine inspiration to the forefront of such a fleshly, amorous poem: Presume not then ye flesh confounded soules, That cannot beare the full Castalian bowles, Which sever mounting spirits from the sences, To looke in this deepe fount for thy pretenses. (Hymnus in Cynthiam, 162–5) Jackson observes, quoting Middleton Murry: The shift from ‘ye’ to ‘thy’ ‘betrays that Chapman is hitting at an individual’, and the object of dismissal is the Shakespeare who presumed to cite Ovid’s couplet Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua (‘Let common folk admire vile things; may fairhaired Apollo [god of poetry] serve me goblets filled with Castalian water [from the spring sacred to the Muses]’) as epigraph to Venus and Adonis.2 Jackson also quotes Douglas Bush’s description of Chapman’s verses as ‘the protest of a mystic and moralist against a leader of the fleshly school’. In the lines quoted, Chapman implies that while he has genuinely drawn his own inspiration from a ‘deepe fount’, another poet – apparently Shakespeare – has made a false claim to have done so. Drawing attention to the loftily philosophical and neo-Platonic character of his own first published work, Chapman sets himself up in opposition to Shakespeare’s ‘flesh confounded’ approach. His Shadow of Night, composed of two ‘nocturnal’ mythological poems, Hymnus in Noctem and Hymnus in Cynthiam, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 31 December 1593. He is likely to have started work on it within months or weeks of the first appearance of Venus and Adonis. Chapman’s responses to Shakespeare’s poem extend well beyond his condemnation of its epigraph. Shakespeare had fashioned a ‘flesh confounded’ narrative in which the Goddess of Love, evoked in uncompromisingly carnal terms, makes strenuous efforts to

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seduce the mortal youth Adonis. She woos him with witty words; she inveigles him into kissing her, lies on top of him, and fondles him. Finally, she tries desperately to dissuade him from going off hunting, imploring him above all not to pursue the boar, a savage and dangerous quarry. Chapman’s second poem, Hymnus in Cynthiam, echoes and answers Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Both poems have woodland settings. But while Venus opens with the arrival of dawn, Hymnus opens with the onset of night. Venus closes with the goddess mounting the skies ‘In her light chariot’; Hymnus in Cynthiam opens with the poet’s appeal to Cynthia, the moon goddess: ‘Ascend thy chariot’. There are further contrasts and complementarities. The action of Venus begins with the goddess’s urgently physical wooing of the mortal youth ‘Rosecheeked Adonis’. But Chapman’s goddess is chaste. Only near the end of Hymnus does the poet allude to Cynthia’s alleged dalliance with a mortal youth, and he emphatically bowdlerizes and allegorizes this episode, presenting it as a meeting of minds rather than bodies: [thou] didst affect, Endimion for his studious intellect. Thy soule-chast kisses were for vertues sake, And since his eyes were evermore awake, To search for knowledge of thy excellence, And all Astrologie: no negligence, Or female softnesse fede his learned trance, Nor was thy vaile once toucht with dalliance. (Hymnus in Cynthiam, 493–500) Shakespeare’s Venus delivers an eloquent speech against the hunting of the boar, a savage brute which will destroy Adonis’s beauty, and with it, his life (VA 613–42). In contrast, Chapman’s Cynthia is herself an enthusiastic huntress, whose metamorphosed nymph ‘Euthymia’ is pursued by a hugely variegated pack of hounds of her own creation. Others, hunters and hunted, have been metamorphosed by Cynthia from lustful men into exotic but spectral beasts. Chapman here relied heavily on the moralized

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Mythologiae of Natalis Comes, a work unknown to Shakespeare – or if known, not drawn on.3 Despite Venus’s pleas, Shakespeare’s Adonis goes off to hunt the boar, which wounds him fatally. In Chapman’s poem, too, a boar, formerly a panther, formerly a nymph (Euthymia), becomes an object of pursuit. But all of these are allegorical phantoms. As dawn approaches, The Goddesse blew retrait, and with her blast Her morns creation did like vapours wast. This seems to glance at the metamorphosis that occurs at the end of Venus, when the dead body of Adonis ‘melted like a vapour from her sight’ before reappearing in the form of ‘A purple flower . . . chequered with white’ (VA 1166–8), an object that Venus then tucks between her breasts in a gesture that appears more erotic than maternal.4 At the end of Shakespeare’s poem the metamorphosis of Adonis appears to be permanent, while all the transformations in Chapman’s Hymnus are ephemeral. Even the dedication of Shakespeare’s poem is ‘answered’ by Chapman. Shakespeare had played a trump card at the outset with his confident epistle to the wealthy young Earl of Southampton. Chapman’s immediate patron was not a nobleman, but merely the elusive but well connected gentleman Matthew Roydon. However, he makes it clear that he views Roydon as a useful stepping stone towards patronage in the future from not just one, but three, eminent noblemen, to whom he plans to dedicate more ambitious poems in the future: I remember my good Mat. how joyfully oftentimes you reported unto me, that most ingenious Darbie, deepe searching Northumberland, and skill imbracing heire of Hunsdon had most profitably entertained learning in themselves, to the vitall warmth of freezing science, & to the admirable luster of their true Nobilitie, whose high deserving vertues may cause me hereafter strike that fire out of darknesse, which the brightest Day shall envie for beautie.

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Shakespeare could boast to his readers about the promising young bird in his hand. But Chapman has spied three even more splendid ones in a nearby bush. Whether or not Chapman consciously designed his Hymnus in Cynthiam as an answer to and critique of Venus and Adonis, it seems highly probable that Shakespeare received it as such. He would have been right to suspect that Chapman was keeping a close eye on his poems, for the latter’s next poem, Ovids Banquet of Sense (1595), is an extended moralized ‘correction’ of Venus and Adonis 433–58, a comically erotic account of a banquet of the five senses.5 A parallel to a passage in The Rape of Lucrece also appears in the final stanza of Ovids Banquet. Chapman invokes the skill of ‘expert Painters’ in showing a monarch holding a sceptre while depicting ‘But halfe his fingers’. Though there may be a common source in Philostratus, the image is strongly analogous to Lucrece in which a ‘skilful painting made for Priam’s Troy’ (1367) is especially praised for showing the great Achilles simply by his ‘spear / Griped in an armed hand’ (1424–5). Chapman continued to tread hard on Shakespeare’s heels, for both of his earliest stage comedies incorporate echoes of his very popular Love’s Labour’s Lost, the second, An Humorous Day’s Mirth, mimicking features both of plot and structure, with a courtly show in the final act that is constantly interrupted.6 Jackson has argued that a major figure among the ‘Rival Poets’ apparently alluded to in Sonnets 78–86 originated in these years, although the Sonnets themselves belong to the years 1598–1600. This potent rival is Marlowe, whose reputation is still high today. Another rival, as above, is Chapman, whose poems have not attracted many modern admirers. But as Jackson has pointed out, Marlowe and Chapman were publicly connected to each other in 1598 – so closely, indeed, that scarcely any modern editors have fully separated them. It is in 1598–1600 that Shakespeare’s works are suddenly marked by allusions to and citations from Marlowe. As I have argued elsewhere, both Shakespeare and Marlowe responded to the attacks made on them in Groatsworth in the autumn of 1592 by embarking on ambitious non-dramatic poems

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with classical origins.7 Both poems are ‘Ovidian’, Shakespeare’s drawing on Metamorphoses, Marlowe’s on Heroides.8 A scattering of shared words and phrases suggests that at some point they studied each other’s work in progress. But while Shakespeare completed Venus and Adonis, and it was print-published in late May or early June 1593, it appears that Marlowe’s Hero and Leander had been left unfinished at the time of his sudden and violent death on 30 May 1593. There is no definite evidence that Marlowe had been personally acquainted with the former soldier, now aspirant poet, George Chapman, though it is theoretically possible that they met during the winter of 1591–2, when Marlowe was in Flushing, sharing lodgings with Richard Baines. Chapman seems to have been serving as a soldier in the Netherlands from 1585 until 1593 or 1594.9 It certainly seems that both men knew that helpful gentleman Matthew Roydon. As already mentioned, it was to Roydon that Chapman dedicated his Shadow of Night. Roydon had also been mentioned in connection with Marlowe’s escape plans in the celebrated letters written by Thomas Kyd to Sir John Puckering, the first naming him, along with Harriott and Warner, as one of Marlowe’s cronies, and the second transmitting a rumour that Roydon had fled to Scotland, ‘where [Marlowe] . . . told me when I saw him last he meant to be’.10 At some point, if we can credit the epistle to Lady Walsingham prefixed to his continuation of Hero and Leander, Chapman came under the patronage of her husband Thomas, Marlowe’s attested patron and protector in 1592–3. At the end of this epistle Chapman alludes to Sir Thomas’s ‘continuance of ancient kindnes to my stillobscured estate’. However, unlike the stationer Edward Blount, whose dedicatory epistle to Walsingham fronts both the first edition of Hero and Leander and the second, ‘completed’, version, Chapman does not claim to have known Marlowe. Perhaps it was either from the Walsinghams, or with Roydon’s help, that Chapman procured a copy of Marlowe’s unfinished poem. But alternatively, and perhaps more probably, he may simply have purchased a printed text of the poem as first

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published by Marlowe’s friend Edward Blount in 1598, working rapidly to compose his own very substantial additions. These ‘completed’ Marlowe’s poem, now divided by him into two ‘Sestiads’ or heroic narratives concerning Sestos, by the addition of a further four ‘Sestiads’ written by himself. Each of the six Sestiads is headed by an ‘Argument’, or plot summary in rhyming couplets. It is curious that modern editors of Marlowe’s nondramatic verse have retained both Chapman’s division into ‘Sestiads’ and the ‘Arguments’ prefixed to Marlowe’s share as well as his own. The joint-authored work was published by Paul Linley later in 1598 under the title Hero and Leander: begun by Christopher Marloe; and finished by George Chapman. It is highly unlikely that Marlowe, had he lived to complete the poem, would have made it anything like so long, nor so full of neo-Platonic allegory and myth-making. Chapman’s additions signally lack Marlowe’s witty concision and adroit shifts of tone. One modern scholar has thought that the Marlowe fragment required only a few more lines, being essentially complete. According to Roma Gill, ‘Chapman . . . took it upon himself to remedy what he clearly thought was Marlowe’s negligence by extending the narrative to include Musaeus’ tragic ending.’11 But a more plausible scenario is that Marlowe fully intended to complete the story derived from Musaeus, with its tragic denouement, but was prevented from doing so by his death. As Jackson has argued, the appearance in print of this ‘collaboration between a living poet and a ghost’ presented a considerable challenge to Shakespeare, for it effectively brought the brilliant Marlowe back to life: ‘Chapman . . . speaks of being drawn to his task “by strange instigation” and in the third sestiad . . . invokes the spirit of Marlowe to aid him . . . With the 1598 publication of Hero and Leander Marlowe and Chapman merged as Shakespeare’s Rival.’ For Marlowe the poet, 1598 was an annus mirabilis. Though John Wolfe had entered Hero and Leander in the Stationers’ Register on 28 September 1593, he seems not to have published it. Certainly no copies survive. Given the flurry of excitement provoked by the appearance of Blount’s edition in

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1598 it is likely that this was the poem’s first appearance in public. Chapman was not alone in speedily taking advantage of the popularity of Marlowe’s poem. Also in 1598, the youthful clothworker and scrivener Henry Petowe produced The second part of Hero and Leander. Conteyning their further fortunes, published by Andrew Harris. This was far more modest than Chapman’s venture, being explicitly described as a sequel to Marlowe’s poem, not a completion of it. Also, unlike Chapman’s, Petowe’s tone was modest. In his dedicatory epistle to Sir Henry Guilford Petowe describes himself as ‘but a flie’, even though he has dared ‘to soare wyth the Aegle’. Despite its modest aspirations, Shakespeare appears to have read Petowe’s poem with some attention. As B.L. Joseph pointed out, in a note overlooked by modern editors of Hamlet, one of Hamlet’s excited exclamations to Horatio, after The Murder of Gonzago has successfully ‘outed’ Claudius as a murderer, seems to derive from some verses in Petowe’s poem, a complaint by Leander:12 The stricken Deere stands not in awe of blacke grym irefull Death, For he findes hearbes that can withdrawe the shaft to save his breath. Compare: Why let the stricken deer go weep, The hart ungalled play, For some must watch while some must sleep. Thus runs the world away. (Ham 3.2.263–6) The metre of Petowe’s lyric is identical to that of Hamlet’s verse, and Petowe appears to be the originator of the phrase ‘stricken deer’. The vigour with which Marlowe’s Hero and Leander was imitated must have reminded Shakespeare vividly of similar responses to his own Venus and Adonis in 1593/4 in ways that were at once exciting and uncomfortable. Though Marlowe had been dead for

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five years, it was not until 1598–1600 that Shakespeare repeatedly quoted from him and commented on him, even though he was not normally in the habit of quoting precisely from contemporary poets. What may be his earliest quotations from Marlowe occur in The Merry Wives of Windsor, at least if the old theory that the play was written for the Garter Feast at Whitehall in April 1597 is accepted. However, if Giorgio Melchiori is correct in arguing that in its complete form the play was written late in 1599 then they belong within the same time-frame as Shakespeare’s other Marlowe citations. They occur in 3.1, when Parson Hugh Evans is nervously preparing to meet Doctor Caius in a duel. Beset by ‘trempling of mind’ and ‘melancholies’ he tries to calm himself down by singing parts of a song inviting its addressee to a very different kind of assignation: To shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sings madrigals – There will we make our peds of roses And a thousand fragrant posies. (MW 3.1.16–19) Evans then repeats and mangles the lines, replacing ‘fragrant posies’ with ‘vagram posies’, and inserting another line associated with a river, but not by Marlowe: ‘Whenas I sat in Pabylon’. The phrase ‘To shallow [rivers]’ is thrice repeated, in the third instance as ‘To shallow, etc.’, suggesting that a performer of Evans who was a particularly good, or amusing, singer was at liberty to sing another verse or two of the poem that we know as Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, described by Millar MacLure as ‘the most popular of all Elizabethan lyrics’. If – as I am inclined to believe – Melchiori’s late dating of Merry Wives is correct, Shakespeare may have been drawing on the short version of the poem that appears in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), where it is attributed to himself. However, a line and a bit are quoted by Ithamore in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (4.2.109), and it is likely that Shakespeare knew that the lyric was by Marlowe. It was publicly attributed to him for the first time in Englands Helicon (1600), and

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was also attributed to him by the generally reliable Francis Davison.13 Later in The Merry Wives Shakespeare alludes to Doctor Faustus, when Bardolph recounts the flight of three of the Host’s horses ridden by ‘cozeners’, ‘like three German devils, three Doctor Faustasses’ (4.5.67). In terms of dating, we are on firmer ground in considering As You Like It. It was written some time between October 1598 and August 1600. In Act 3 the shepherdess Phoebe falls instantly in love with ‘Ganymede’, the disguised heroine Rosalind: Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: ‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’ (AYL 3.5.82–3; cf. Hero and Leander, 147–8) Juliette Dusinberre suggests in her note on these lines that ‘Shakespeare slyly mocks Marlowe by giving his lines to a girl who is neither Hero nor heroine’. To me, however, this appears to be an unironic tribute. Marlowe’s line functions as an affirmation both of the immediacy and the intensity of the shepherdess’s sudden passion. The situation’s gender confusion, or homoeroticism, is an aptly Marlovian feature. The citation was likely to prompt an effect of enjoyable recognition in the play’s first audiences, many of them familiar with, and delighted by, Marlowe’s newly published poem. As Millar MacLure has said, Hero and Leander ‘was immensely successful; in fact it became virtually an institution, and like other institutions was imitated and parodied to excess’.14 Immediate testimony to the poem’s popularity was given by Marlowe’s former collaborator Nashe in his Lenten Stuffe (1598–9), in which he pretends to introduce both the poem and the myth to the provincial burghers of Yarmouth: Let me see, hath any bodie in Yarmouth heard of Leander and Hero, of whome divine Musaeus sung, and a diviner Muse than him, Kit Marlow? Twoo faithfull lovers they were, as everie apprentise in Paules churchyard will tell you for your love, and sel you for your mony.15

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In Nashe’s brilliant burlesque retelling of the story the drowned lovers are metamorphosed after death into two of the fish most commonly eaten on fast-days and during Lent, ling and herring. Rosalind’s comments on the tragedy of Hero and Leander are also satirical. They seem to have been originally intended, and received, as alluding to the story as narrated in Marlowe’s poem, and perhaps also to Nashe’s irreverent treatment: Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned, and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (AYL 4.1.91–9) I shall return to the last sentence of this passage. Further allusions to Marlowe in As You Like It indicate that the ‘Dead shepherd’ invoked by Phoebe is to be viewed with admiration and regret rather than with mockery. They also suggest that the play was written either towards the end of 1599, or early in 1600, for they reflect two major external events. The first, alluded to in the celebrated ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech, is the opening of the new Globe theatre in Southwark in the late summer of 1599. The other, equally momentous, is the celebrated ‘Bishops’ Ban’ on satirical and supposedly libellous works. The bishops in question were John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London. The list of printed books called in by them to be ceremonially burned, issued on 1 June 1599, included ‘Davyes Epigrams, with Marlowes Elegys’. If Cyndia Clegg’s interpretation is correct, the bishops’ prime target was Davies’s satirical epigrams. She suggests that they were not so much concerned with bawdy writing as with works that appeared libellous or subversive, and especially ones that might have a bearing on Essex’s military campaign in Ireland. But

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since Davies’s epigrams were printed along with Marlowe’s ‘Elegies’ – his translations of Ovid’s Amores – dead Marlowe was now joined at the hip to living Davies, just as he had been joined at the hip to the living George Chapman in 1598.16 The circumstances of this undated publication are mysterious. It is generally agreed that its ‘Middleborough’ imprint is false. Who did publish and print it, and how John Davies of the Middle Temple came to have his epigrams soldered on to Marlowe’s erotic translations, continue to be mysteries. But the cultural outcome is clear. Barely had dead Marlowe been summoned back to life as a poet in 1599 before the body of his verse endured violent and destructive assault at the hands of the bishops analogous to that inflicted on his physical body by Ingram Frizer back in 1593. As early as the second scene of As You Like It Celia talks sympathetically to Touchstone about the present time as one in which witty writing is suppressed: ‘since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show’ (AYL 1.2.87–9). Many of the works called in by the bishops were comic and/or bawdy, and in this sense could be categorized as ‘foolish’ forms of wit. There may also be an allusion here to the severe measures applied to Jonson and Nashe after a single performance of their satirical comedy The Isle of Dogs. Fuller comments, which seem explicitly to allude to the case of Marlowe’s Ovidian translations being censored, are delivered by Touchstone himself in 3.3. These would be better understood by theatre audiences in 1599–1600 than by the insensate Audrey, to whom they are ostensibly addressed. Exiled from an oppressive court to the social freedom of the Forest of Arden, Touchstone here identifies himself with the Roman poet Ovid, exiled to the (pastoral?) Black Sea coast by the Emperor Augustus for his satirical writings: ‘I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths’ (3.3.5–7). Obviously an allusion to Ovid need not also be an allusion to Marlowe. But Touchstone’s next lines suggest that this one is: ‘When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding,

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it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room’ (3.3.10–14). As Jackson rightly observes, This is usually taken as a reference to Marlowe, with a glance at his death from a dagger wound during an alleged quarrel over a lodging-house ‘reckoning’ or bill and an echo of Barabas’s ‘infinite riches in a little room’ in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.17 Jackson also points out that Touchstone’s speech and that of Rosalind quoted above were both influenced by a passage in Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia, published in September 1598. Unusually expansive at this point, after his comparative comments on Roman writers and their contemporary English equivalents Meres makes the biographical observation that ‘Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love’. He also alludes to the previous and rather different account of Marlowe’s death given by Thomas Beard in 1597. This passage occurs soon after Meres’s account of Ovid’s banishment to a life in exile ‘with the barbarous Getes’, so that, as Jackson observes, ‘The two key elements in Touchstone’s allusion to Marlowe in As You Like It (the tavern killing and Ovid’s exile) are thus also brought together by Meres, and in the same order.’18 With his Ovidian poems suppressed Marlowe was even ‘more dead’ in 1599 than he had been in 1593. As for Rosalind’s speech: Charles Nicholl, supported by Jackson, has proposed that her assertion that in the course of human history many men have died, ‘but not for love’, is an implicit correction of Meres’s claim that Marlowe was slain by ‘a rival of his in his lewd love’.19 We should not necessarily construe Rosalind’s statement as a reflection of Shakespeare’s personal views about what had really been going on in that ‘little room’ in Deptford on 30 May 1593. But the cluster of allusions to Marlowe’s ‘Ovidian’ verses, to their being misunderstood by the authorities, to his flight from those authorities, and to his shockingly violent death, points strongly towards an active interest in all these matters shared by Shakespeare and his audience in

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1599–1600.The circumstances of Marlowe’s death were probably as fascinating and as controversial then as they are today. Further allusions to Marlowe are made in several Sonnets. According to Jackson, Sonnet 74, beginning ‘But be contented when that fell arrest’, ‘is roughly contemporary with the Rival Poet sonnets that immediately succeed it’. That is, it belongs to 1598–1600. It includes lines that Dover Wilson felt were impossible to read as anything but an allusion to Marlowe’s death. The speaker anticipates that he may die very suddenly, as if arrested in the street by a ‘sergeant’. While his body will return to the earth, his ‘spirit’, whose essence is preserved in verse, will ‘remain’ with the addressee: So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life, The prey of worms, my body being dead, The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife. (74.9–11) As Jackson points out, there is no tradition of describing Death or Time as a ‘wretch’.20 Also, to equip either of these universal agents of destruction with a mere ‘knife’, rather than with a dart, spear or scythe, would be distinctly unconventional. Ingram Frizer could well be viewed as both ‘cowardly’ and a ‘wretch’ in giving Marlowe a fatal wound with his twelve-penny knife. Though Frizer’s claim to have struck the fatal blow in Marlowe’s eye in self-defence was accepted by the coroner’s court, Marlowe’s friends may well have viewed Frizer’s blow as a cowardly and unmanly action, one which gave his opponent no chance of a fair fight. And if Marlowe could meet such a sudden end, so, the speaker reflects, could anyone. But like Marlowe, the sonnetspeaker hopes at least to leave some poetic remains, to be read, and possibly published, after his death. Sonnet 74, articulating the speaker’s fear that he, like Marlowe, may endure a sudden and violent death, heralds a variety of wider reflections on his own life, love and writings. The speaker presents his own verse as stolid and unvaried compared with that of the rival poets, though it has nevertheless provoked these writers

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to cultivate the same patron as himself. In Sonnet 84 he suggests that the patron/friend/love object has bestowed favourable attention on the verse of these rivals, thus betraying his own weakness of character, ‘Being fond on praise’ (84.14). The rivals appear to be living and active individuals, and as such, they present an immediate threat. It is not until the last of the ‘Rival Poet(s)’ group, 86, that dead Marlowe appears to resurface. This sonnet is so richly interesting that it requires to be quoted in full: Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you, That did my ripe thoughts in my brain in-hearse, Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew? Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead? No, neither he, nor his compeers by night, Giving him aid, my verse astonished. He, nor that affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls him with intelligence, As victors of my silence cannot boast; I was not sick of any fear from thence. But when your countenance filled up his line, Then lacked I matter, that enfeebled mine. The first two lines have often been linked to Chapman, and there are several ways in which such an allusion seems plausible. The first of his Homeric translations, The Seven Books of the Iliads, was dedicated to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex in 1598. Chapman addresses him as ‘THE MOST HONORED / now living Instance of the Achilleian vertues / eterniz’d by divine HOMERE’. In an extended dedicatory epistle he again addresses Essex as ‘renown’de Achilles’, and looks to him to defend the humble translator against his detractors. The larger implication of this identification is that Essex is a supreme military leader. It is safe to assume that Chapman had in mind the likelihood of Essex being appointed to lead the troops despatched to Ireland to put down Tyrone’s long and troublesome rebellion. This

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expedition would require him, like a Greek general travelling to Troy, to ‘sail’ across the sea. Essex did indeed set sail for Ireland from Anglesey on 6 April 1599. Here, however, it is the rival poet who is imagined as a merchant adventurer setting sail on the ocean in the hope of capturing booty, or a rich ‘prize’. The ‘proud full sail’ image may also have a more formal, literary application. Like Chapman’s later translations from The Iliad, not fully completed until 1611, when they were printed by Shakespeare’s old friend Richard Field, The Seven Books are written in long-lined rhyming couplets, seven iambic feet, known as fourteeners, as in these opening lines: Achilles banefull wrath, resound great Goddesse of my verse That through th’afflicted host of Greece did worlds of woes disperse . . . This was a rather old-fashioned verse form, yet impressive in its own way in so far as it gestured respectfully towards the hexameters of the original. Chapman then wrote a short spin-off, Achilles Shield, derived from Iliad 18, dedicated to Essex after the expected appointment had been made. This poem could not in the same technical sense be described as ‘great’, i.e. ‘long-lined’, verse, for it is written in pentameter couplets. Yet it had its own high-profile status as a small ‘travelling’ book that Essex could, if he wished, carry about his person all the time while on campaign, rather as the great conqueror Alexander was alleged to travel with the works of Homer. The fact of a second dedication to the same patron within a matter of weeks shows that the previous offering had been viewed with favour, and that Essex had both rewarded Chapman generously and indicated that further Homeric verses would be acceptable. If Sonnet 86.1–2 alludes to George Chapman, and specifically to his dedication to Essex of his earliest translation(s) from Homer, it seems to follow that Shakespeare, too, must have been in pursuit of favour from Essex. This is not improbable. Shakespeare’s attested early patron Southampton was a close friend and

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Fig. 5. George Chapman, one of Shakespeare’s rivals.

ally of Essex. The two young orphaned noblemen had both been wards of Lord Burghley. They were to be held jointly responsible for leading the abortive ‘rising’ in the City of London on 8 February 1601, though Southampton was lucky enough to have his death sentence commuted to a ‘confined doom’, that is, life imprisonment (see Sonnet 107.4). He was released and pardoned by James even before the new King had reached Westminster. Shakespeare’s success in securing the patronage of Southampton in early 1594 might lead naturally to his also seeking the patronage of his close friend Essex. In any case, in the later 1590s,

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and especially after his appointment as Earl Marshal, Essex was the single most sought-after courtly patron. There is further evidence for Shakespeare’s support for Essex. Notoriously, in a Chorus in Henry V Shakespeare compared the public excitement in London that greeted Henry on his return from victory at Agincourt to the (expected) excitement that would greet ‘the General of our gracious Empress’ on his triumphant return from suppressing rebellion in Ireland. Unlike some scholars, I do believe that it was a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II that Essex’s cronies commissioned for performance at the Globe on 7 February 1601. This episode will be fully discussed in Chapter 6. In the penultimate ‘fair youth’ sonnet, 125, Essex’s spectacular rise and fall appear to be invoked as events that the speaker has himself witnessed: Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour Lose all, and more, by paying too much rent, For compound sweet forgoing simple savour, Pitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent? (125.5–8) The phrase ‘compound sweet’ is best explained as a reference to the lucrative ‘farm of sweet wines’ that Elizabeth had awarded to Essex at the height of his favour, and which she famously refused to renew after his unlicensed return from Ireland in September 1599. He could also be aptly described as a ‘pitiful thriver’ who had been ‘spent’, or utterly destroyed, by ‘gazing’. After he burst into Elizabeth’s bed-chamber at Nonsuch and saw her in her night-shift, with her grey hair loose about her shoulders, he was never again allowed in her presence. Given Essex’s disgrace, rebellion and ultimate execution, it would not be surprising if Shakespeare expunged most traces of his own attempts to secure patronage from him, permitting his Sonnets, when he finally prepared them for publication, to be bundled together under a highly misleading claim that their ‘onlie begetter’ had been Master W.H. (William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke?). Yet traces of former attempts to cultivate Essex appear to survive in Sonnet 86, and possibly elsewhere.

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In so far as he corresponds with actual individuals, the ‘fair youth’ is almost certainly an amalgam, rather than one single nobleman for whom Shakespeare had composed sonnets for a decade or more. Southampton, Essex, Pembroke and even others may in turn have been addressees and/or recipients of some of the main sequence of 126 sonnets which aftercomers will tend instinctively to read as addressed to a single ‘fair youth’ with whom the speaker has a complex and often conflicted relationship. Sonnets in which the speaker declares that his addressee will be remembered for ever because of these poems, yet refrains from naming or describing this glorious individual, may have been carefully designed to be capable of being recycled for different patrons. Perhaps Shakespeare presented some work to Essex in manuscript that has not survived. However, Sonnet 86 implies that he did not. We need to continue to scrutinize this sonnet. Lines 3–4 suggest that the poet-speaker had been all prepared to produce a poem for ‘you’, the patron addressed, but was so outfaced by the ambition and learning of his rival’s offering that his own ‘ripe thoughts’ were aborted in his ‘brain’, ‘Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew’. This suggests that we have not lost a poem or poems presented to Essex by Shakespeare. He never completed such a work, perhaps because the competition from his learned and ambitious rival was too intense. However, the first four lines are framed in the form of a question, and imply that it was not the scale and grandeur of Chapman’s Homeric versions that silenced him, even though they could well have done. The next two lines also take the form of a question, and allude to Chapman’s assertion that he was directly inspired by dead poets. These seem to clinch the identification, for such invocations were most unusual among Elizabethan poets. In his Defence of Poesy Sidney had explicitly condemned them as blasphemous. But as Jackson points out, Chapman claimed ‘to have been inspired by the spirit of Homer himself ’.21 Also, he described himself in his epistle to Lady Walsingham as having been drawn ‘by strange instigation’ to the task of completing Hero and Leander, and implied that Marlowe himself had been his

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inspirer. In a celebrated passage in the third ‘Sestiad’ Chapman despatches his own spirit to ‘seek out’ the ‘free soul’ of Marlowe, who, when alive, ‘stood / Up to the chin in the Pierian flood’. That is (if I follow Chapman here), Marlowe himself had been inspired by the Muses, and Chapman proposes to drink deep from this same well of inspiration, which is at once Marlovian and ‘Musaean’. The subject of ‘it’ in these ensuing lines appears still to be the ‘free soul’ of Marlowe: Confer with it, and make my pledge as deepe, That neithers draught be consecrate to sleepe. Tell it how much his late desires I tender (If it yet know not), and to light surrender My soules darke offspring, willing it should die To loves, to passions, and societie. (Hero and Leander, Sestiad III.193–8) Chapman, then, lays claim to multiple sources of inspiration: from Musaeus, from Homer, and from Marlowe. The process of imbibing this rich draught is strongly associated with darkness, the end-product being described as ‘My soules darke offspring’. Shakespeare’s double reference to ‘night’ in Sonnet 86 – ‘by night’ in line 7, and ‘nightly’ in line 10 – does not allude to a secret society called the ‘School of Night’, which, as Jackson rightly observes, is ‘a chimera born of a misprint’. But it does allude to Chapman’s trademark preoccupation with night and darkness, signalled in his earliest book, The Shadow of Night, and repeated in many later passages like the one just quoted. It is striking – in terms of the issue of patronage – that immediately after these lines Chapman pays tribute to ‘princely Essex’ for his surprise raid on Cadiz. In line 6 of Sonnet 86 Shakespeare’s phrase ‘Above a mortal pitch’ appears to glance at Chapman’s despatch of his own spirit to the distant empyrean, ‘th’eternal clime / Of his free soul’. The phrase ‘struck me dead’ applies to the speaker himself the comments made by Touchstone on Marlowe: ‘It strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room’. This sounds para-

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doxical, for can there be degrees of deadness? But a poet whose poetic voice has been silenced is ‘dead’ for posterity, whereas one who continues to be read is still alive. The speaker in 86, who has not even been able to give utterance to his poetic conceit, for it is ‘in-hearse[d]’ in his brain as if in a ‘tomb’, shares that kind of deadness with Marlowe. But though he has been ‘struck dead’, it was apparently not by the overweening claims to inspiration made by his rival, although, again, it could well have been. As Jackson observes, Sonnet 86 is unusual both in style and structure. Unlike every other sonnet except 145 it is written in the past tense; and most unusually, it falls into sense-units of 6:6:2. All the possibilities raised in the first six lines are denied in the next five/six, heralded with the ‘pivotal’ word ‘No’ that opens line 7. In 7–8 the speaker answers his own questions. It was neither Chapman, nor his alleged inspirers – Homer, Musaeus, Marlowe – who struck him dumb. Shakespeare had used the word ‘astonished’ for ‘dumbstruck’ in Lucrece (1730). If we detect a note of contempt or sarcasm in the phrase ‘his compeers by night’, we are probably right. As Jackson has shown, Shakespeare seems to have picked up the rather unusual word ‘compeer’ from Meres, who had applied it to the comic actor Robert Wilson, Tarlton’s theatrical heir, ‘who, for learning and extemporall witte in this facultie, is without compare or compeere’.22 This is evidently laudatory, with a touch of punning playfulness apt for the theme of comic improvisation. But the word was later deployed by Jonson in a context whose contemptuous tone is inescapable, and that also appears to echo Sonnet 86. In The Alchemist 4.6.40–41 Surly prepares to unmask the confidence-tricksters Face and Subtle, the latter being initially described as ‘this Doctor, / Your sooty, smoakie-bearded compeere’ – a false alchemist who can only cause explosions, not create gold. A couple of lines on, Surly’s further description of him suggests definite recollections of, and allusions to, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 86: Or, he is the FAVSTUS, That casteth figures, and can conjure, cures

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Plagues, piles, and poxe, by the Ephemerides, And holds intelligence with all the bawdes. (4.6.46–9) The combination in this speech of the words ‘compeer’ and ‘intelligence’ with an invocation of Marlowe’s best known play – the one that concerns a highly dubious magician – suggests that Jonson had studied Shakespeare’s fascinatingly allusive Sonnet 86 very closely, and that he believed it to concern Marlowe and his alleged posthumous collaboration with Chapman. He may have been in a position to know. Moving on to lines 9–12: ‘that affable familiar ghost’ certainly appears to allude to Marlowe, here described as friendly and companionable to Chapman. ‘Affable’, defined by OED as ‘Easy of conversation or address’, could be paraphrased in modern terms as ‘easy to talk to’; and ‘familiar’ suggests a close friend, though perhaps with sinister shades of a conjuror’s or witch’s diabolical ‘familiar’ spirit – a resonance that appears to have been picked up by Jonson. Shakespeare had been personally acquainted with Marlowe, whereas Chapman (see above, p. 134) had not. I take it therefore that the phrase ‘affable familiar ghost’ is heavily sarcastic, sarcasm further extended in the next line, ‘Which nightly gulls him with intelligence’. As Jackson remarks, this phrase ‘is oddly appropriate to Marlowe, who had been a government spy. The innuendo would be that, in supposing himself to be receiving aid from the immortal shade of Marlowe himself, Chapman was misled: the ghost was a double agent.’23 The effect is to make the pretentiously intellectual Chapman sound stupid, even silly, and no match even for the ghost of Marlowe, let alone for the sharp-witted poet as he lived. The word ‘gull’ is also powerfully reminiscent of Jonson’s preoccupation, especially in his ‘Humours’ comedies, with gulls and gulling. I shall explore Jonson’s complex rivalry with Shakespeare further in this book’s final chapter. Line 11 of Sonnet 86 used to puzzle me greatly, for I wondered in what sense the writer of so many richly expressive sonnets, including this one, could be characterized by ‘silence’. I now

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suspect that we need to look outside the Sonnets for an explanation. Though Shakespeare had been active in composing sonnets and tinkering with them during the late 1590s, only two of them had reached print in The Passionate Pilgrim, the rest, as Meres had recently informed the reading public, being known only to his ‘private friends’. While comparable contemporaries, including Chapman and Drayton, combined writing plays for public performance with composing print-published poems and sonnets dedicated to courtly patrons, Shakespeare had not produced a substantial poem since The Rape of Lucrece in the summer of 1594. Given the huge popularity of both Venus and Lucrece, and their efficacy in enhancing both his status and his economic strength, he must have known that further narrative poems, Ovidian or otherwise, were likely to meet with favour. But he had not written any, and now – his persona in Sonnet 86 seems to reveal – he will not even attempt to write one. His patron has received the dedication of a work of narrative verse from Chapman, and has looked upon it with a favourable ‘countenance’. If elaborately learned Homeric translations were what delighted Essex, as suitable both to his learning and his military prominence, then Shakespeare could give up, for he was unable to produce such writings: ‘Then lacked I matter’. He has had some ideas for a poem or poems – ‘ripe thoughts’ – but these have now been aborted as unlikely to find favour. Line 12 stands alone as the speaker’s final denial of the power either of the principal rival or of ‘his compeers by night’ to silence him: ‘I was not sick of any fear from thence.’ The closing couplet, as Jackson says, ‘is the last chapter of a mystery, in which, after the suspense, “all is revealed” ’: But when your countenance filled up his line, Then lacked I matter, that enfeebled mine. Previous sonnets in this group deliver appeals to the addressee to cherish the speaker’s verse for its plain sincerity, even though the writing of others may be more complex or fashionable. But 84 indicates that the problem derives from the addressee’s moral

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weakness. After twelve lines in which the speaker claims that his own plain, blunt, language is best, in doing justice to the addressee’s inherent merits – ‘you alone are you’ – there is a sharp sting in this sonnet’s tail: You to your beauteous blessings add a curse, Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse. The true threat to the speaker’s poetic and personal ambitions, it seems, lies not in the grandiosity of the offerings of his rivals, but in the fact that the patron, with his deplorable fondness for ‘praise’, likes them. This moral defect leads to poor literary judgement. In 85 the speaker appeals to the patron to value the speaker for his ‘dumb thoughts’, even though he is unable to generate the ‘good words’ that other poets do. But the closing couplet of 86 cancels such an appeal. The plain-spoken and hardworking sonneteer withdraws his labour. The heart of the ‘mystery’ is that the ultimate villain in the struggle for poetic and personal survival chronicled in this group of sonnets is none of the rival poets, but the patron himself, who has bestowed favour on worthless flatterers. Appropriately, the following sonnet opens with the words ‘Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing’. If the ‘rival poets’ group of sonnets is either wholly or in part associated with Essex, there are obvious reasons why they could not be published close in time to their composition. During the period in which Essex was still in high favour, up to and including the summer of 1599, Shakespeare would hardly dare to deliver such bitter reproaches as those contained in Sonnets 85 and 86. Immediately after his disgrace, attempted coup, and execution the poet would not want to draw attention to the fact that he had at one time looked to him as a patron, even though he shared that aspiration with many other writers. However, a few years after the peaceful accession of James I, on which he comments in Sonnet 107, he could finally look back serenely on those turbulent end-ofthe-century years, while also celebrating a new and apparently far more stable love (patronage?) relationship. This confident serenity is celebrated in the last three of the ‘young man’ sonnets, 123–125.

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I used to be resistant to widespread suggestions that George Chapman was chief among the ‘rival poets’ glanced at in the Sonnets. For one thing, it now seems obvious that he was an inferior writer – pretentious, turgid and wilfully obscure. Despite apparent allusions both to his name (21.14)24 and to his Homeric translations (86.1–2) I couldn’t see why Shakespeare should feel threatened by him. Chapman was such a different kind of writer as not to offer any direct competition. Known to posterity above all as the first English translator of Homer, he has his own distinction, especially thanks to Keats’s sonnet. But that achievement could scarcely be more remote from Shakespeare’s. However, once it is remembered that, as Sonnets 85 and 86 suggest, the real battleground for non-courtly late Elizabethan writers was competition for patronage, everything looks different. If Chapman had been successful in securing major rewards from a patron whom Shakespeare had hoped to please, he could indeed pose a threat. Large, long-term projects, such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Chapman’s translation of Homer, or Drayton’s topographical celebration of England, Poly-Olbion, offered the best chance of securing substantial and lasting support from courtly patrons. The very fact that a project such as Chapman’s was entirely different from anything that Shakespeare could do was what made it threatening. Strikingly, the nearest Shakespeare himself ever came to translating from Greek is in the Sonnets. The sequence is concluded (153 and 154) with two alternative witty treatments of a sixthcentury ad Greek epigram concerning hot baths and venereal disease, though like Chapman in translating Homer, Shakespeare is likely to have made use of a translation into Latin, in this case that of Lubinus, published in 1603. Alternatively, he may have drawn on someone else’s translation of the epigram into English, though none is known to survive. Perhaps one of the raisons d’être for these two sonnets was to give Shakespeare a chance to show, in miniature, that he could, if he chose, write the kind of witty, learned, competitive verse derived from Greek or Latin sources that was generally far more characteristic of Marlowe, Chapman and Jonson.

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But this was not Shakespeare’s natural vein, nor was it what his fans were waiting for. Placed at the very end of the Sonnets volume, and separately attributed to ‘William Shake-speare’, A Lover’s Complaint, with its ‘English’-seeming natural setting and ‘female complaint’ genre was far more characteristic. It provided Shakespeare with a much better opportunity than those Greekderived sonnets had done for a display of his characteristic wit and rhetorical sweetness. It recalled ‘female complaints’ incorporated both in the poems and the plays, such as those of Venus, Lucrece, Margaret of Anjou and Constance, to name but a few. And most immediately, the poem bestows both a voice and a ‘back story’ on a memorable episode in his most popular and celebrated tragedy. The nameless forsaken maiden who is deeply and disastrously under the charm of a moody, fascinating young man of high rank closely resembles Ophelia, except that it is her lovetokens, rather than herself, that she casts into a stream, and we are permitted to hear her own words, rather than those of a sympathetic witness. Brief, perhaps hastily written, the poem nevertheless provided a poignant reminder of Hamlet for that work’s many admirers. It is also the nearest Shakespeare came to writing the further narrative poem for which the first two had created an eager market.

FIVE SILVER-TONGUÈD MELICERT Nor doth the silver tongued Melicert, Drop from his honied Muse one sable teare To mourne her death that graced his desert, And to his laies opend her Royall eare. Shepheard remember our Elizabeth, And sing her Rape, done by that Tarquin, Death. (Henry Chettle, Englandes mourning garment (1603), D2r)1

In the next two chapters I explore developments in Shakespeare’s reputation from the mid-1590s until the early years of the reign of James I. Surviving material is so diverse and complex that discussing it in precise accordance with chronology is virtually impossible. Such an arrangement would also lead to confusion, with continual shifts between printed literature and live performance, and between Shakespeare’s writings and those of others. In this chapter I consider responses to Shakespeare, both implicit and explicit, expressed by four ‘minor’ figures, Francis Meres, William Covell, John Weever and Henry Chettle, the last of whom is arguably ‘major’ in terms of his prolonged and complex interactions with Shakespeare. In the following chapter I bring Shakespeare into more privileged company, exploring three comedies with ‘court’ connections and re-examining the performance of Richard II on 7 February 1601. Finally I glance at his contributions to Robert Chester’s Loves martyr. As the sixteenth century and the reign of Elizabeth I both drew towards a close, Shakespeare attracted swelling bands of admirers.

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Chapman had achieved the unpleasant feat of plagiarizing Shakespeare while simultaneously expressing pious disapproval of his writing (see above, pp. 130-31). Others, however, engaged in forms of imitation that appear to be sincere forms of flattery. The practice of quoting a good phrase from Shakespeare simply for the sake of it, whether or not it is especially apt, continues even today. An example is the popular phrase ‘sea-change’, generally applied in contexts from which the sea, with its metamorphic power, is entirely absent. Eagerness to quote witty phrases from Shakespeare began with his contemporaries. In Palladis Tamia, for instance, Francis Meres praises Michael Drayton for his unusual integrity and politeness, and quotes from Shakespeare perhaps almost unconsciously. According to Meres, Drayton’s personal probity ‘is almost miraculous among good wits in these declining and corrupt times, when there is nothing but rogery in villanous man’.2 The closing phrase is joking and paradoxical, deriving from a speech of Falstaff ’s in 1 Henry IV: ‘You rogue, here’s lime in this sack too. – There is nothing but roguery to be found in villainous man, yet a coward is worse than a cup of sack with lime in it’ (2.4.118–21). Meres, who was an enthusiastic lover both of the theatre and of published literature, may have remembered this play from a performance, rather than from the 1598 printing. The impression made on early audiences by Falstaff ’s quip is suggested by Shakespeare’s decision to recycle it in Hamlet’s mock-revelation to Horatio and Marcellus of what he has just learned from the Ghost: ‘There’s never a villain dwelling in all Denmark / But he’s an arrant knave’ (Ham 1.5.122–3). As a selfcontradictory jest, Falstaff ’s ‘roguery’ quip does not add much of value to Meres’s enthusiastic eulogy of his good friend Drayton, mentioned ‘for the sake of affection’. But like Edward Pudsey, one of the playgoers and readers discussed in Chapter 2, Meres was so taken with Shakespeare’s witty phrases that he snatched an opportunity to quote one without greatly caring how well it applied to the subject in hand. Many of Shakespeare’s most conspicuous turn-of-the-century admirers were Cambridge men, like Henry Peacham, also dis-

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cussed in Chapter 2. In the closing chapter I shall consider the ‘Parnassus Plays’, written and performed by Cambridge men. Francis Meres had taken both his B.A. (1587) and his M.A. (1591) from Pembroke, Cambridge, Edmund Spenser’s former college. He settled in London about 1594/5. The importance of his Palladis Tamia as a public tribute to ‘mellifluous & honytongued Shakespeare’, a re-embodiment of ‘the sweete wittie soule of Ovid’, is well known, as is his symmetrical list of six of Shakespeare’s comedies and six of his tragedies.3 Recently, as discussed in the previous chapter, MacD.P. Jackson has shown that Shakespeare himself read Palladis Tamia with close attention. Yet the full extent of Meres’s theatrical allusions seems not to have been recognized. Some of these are derivative truisms, but others, such as the following, appear to be personal reflections on playgoing: ‘they that often frequent theatres and play houses, with their pleasure doe also reape some profite’;4 ‘A stage-player doeth so adde gesture unto his part, that hee doth not passe beyonde his lynes’;5 ‘A good play is sometimes hissed off the stage, through the fault of the plaier, ill acting it’.6 Just before his celebrated ‘discourse of our English Poets’ Meres delivers an extended plea for better literary patronage in England, connecting this especially with the patronage of stage-players: our famous and learned Lawreat masters of England would entitle our English to far greater admired excellency, if either the Emperor Augustus, or Octavia his sister, a noble Mecaenas were alive to rewarde and countenaunce them; or if our witty Comedians and stately Tragedians (the glorious and goodlie representers of all fine witte, glorified phrase and queint action) bee still supported and uphelde, by which meanes for lacke of Patrones (ô ingratefull and damned age) our Poets are soly or chiefly maintained, countenanced and patronized.7 Even more remarkable is a similitude early on that suggests that Meres had witnessed performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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and Romeo and Juliet. Among examples of female heroism cited in his long section on ‘Women’ are the following: ‘As trusty Thisbe did goare her gorgeous body with the same sworde, wherewith princely Pyramus had prickt himselfe to the hart: so true harted Julietta did die upon the corps of her dearest Romeo.’8 There seems no doubt that it was Shakespeare’s burlesque dramatized version of the Pyramus and Thisbe story that Meres had in mind, rather than any of its sources, for the phrase ‘trusty Thisbe’ occurs in the Prologue spoken by Peter Quince: ‘The trusty Thisbe, coming first by night’ (MND 5.1.139). The alliteration of ‘princely Pyramus . . . prickt’ mimics the playlet’s old-fashioned alliterative style, and seems also to allude to Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.2.56), the first line of Holofernes’s ridiculous poem about the Princess of France’s hunting: ‘The preyful Princess pierced and pricked a pretty pleasing pricket’.9 The passage provides decisive evidence of Meres’s playgoing, since A Midsummer Night’s Dream did not reach print until 1600. And if that allusion relates to performance, it seems likely that the Romeo and Juliet one does, too, with Meres’s tragic image of Juliet dying ‘upon the corps of her dearest Romeo’ reflecting an especially memorable stage tableau. In his New Cambridge edition of the play G. Blakemore Evans added the stage direction ‘Falls on Romeo’s body and dies’.10 Meres’s comment suggests that in terms of the play’s early stage history he was quite right to do so. Meres was also attentive to the text as a whole. Though the phrase ‘true harted Julietta’ does not occur in the play, Juliet invokes her own ‘true heart’ in the key speech in which she tells the Friar that she intends to kill herself with her own knife rather than be forced to marry Paris (4.1.58). An unusual feature of this passage, and one that further underlines the high regard in which he held Shakespeare’s writings, is that Meres here compares two examples from the same writer with each other, which was not his normal procedure. Another of Shakespeare’s Cambridge-educated admirers was William Covell, a young fellow of Queens’. He included tributes to Shakespeare in the epistle from ‘England to her three daughters’ suffixed to his Polimanteia (1595). Near the end, alongside a

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detailed eulogy of the Oxford-educated Samuel Daniel, Covell added in the margin: ‘All praise worthy. Lucrecia Sweet Shakspeare. Eloquent Gaveston. Wanton Adonis. Watsons heyre.’ These comments are so brief as to be rather cryptic. It is not clear whether Covell remembered that Drayton, rather than Shakespeare, was the author of the ‘Eloquent’ verse complaint Peirs Gaveston, published at the end of 1593. Like Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, which is explicitly echoed by Drayton at three points, Peirs Gaveston has no author’s name on the title-page. But like Shakespeare’s Venus it does have the author’s name at the end of its dedicatory epistle – in this case, to Henry Cavendish. It is not clear what Covell means by ‘Watsons heyre’. Perhaps he implies that Shakespeare’s fair youth Adonis, invoked as a synecdoche for the poem in which he figures, is a worthy successor to Thomas Watson’s Latin poem Amyntas (1585), also focused on a fair youth who dies and is metamorphosed into a flower. For non-graduate Shakespeare to be so highly praised by a fellow of a Cambridge college was distinctly flattering. Polimanteia was printed by John Legate, printer to the University of Cambridge, and dedicated to the Earl of Essex. Like Meres, Covell was a connoisseur of contemporary literature. Early on in the appended epistle by ‘England’ he urges literary young men to emulate ‘the love-writing muse of divine Sydnay, and the pure flowing streame of Chrystallin Spenser . . . write then of Elizas raigne, a taske onely meete for so rare a pen.’11 He acknowledges that Oxford has, so far, produced even more poets than Cambridge. But the Inns of Court, England’s third cultural ‘daughter’, have produced more still. Edwards’s Cephalus and Procris, whose praise of Shakespeare was discussed in Chapter 1, is mentioned briefly by Covell among ‘workes I dispraise not’; then, in the margin, ‘But by the greedy Printers so made prostitute that they are contemned’. This may indicate that Covell thought it hastily and badly printed, in which case some of what I touched on in Chapter 1 as Edwards’s clumsy wording could be the product of bad printing. Covell was a controversial figure during his Cambridge years, with enemies in high places. Yet this may have served, as contro-

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versy so often does, to attract wide interest to his first book, including its literary afterpiece. After the publication of Polimanteia Roger Goad, Provost of King’s and Vice-Chancellor, ‘reported to Lord Burghley and Archbishop Whitgift that Covell’s remarks had been directed “offensively and extraordinarily, to charge the noblemen of this realm especially; and in sort also the bishops”.’ 12 Certainly Polimanteia proper tackled a large and politically sensitive topic: predictions, true or false, concerning ‘the fall of a common-wealth’. However, Covell argued strongly against any resort to superstition or prophecy, especially with reference to political change. This view ought to have met with approval in high places. Eventually, having perhaps examined the book himself, and having also become personally acquainted with Covell, Whitgift became Covell’s patron. In 1601 he found him his first benefice, the living of Sittingbourne, in Kent.13 There had also been severe doubts about the probity of Covell’s personal life. In the summer of 1596 the Vice-Chancellor’s Court heard detailed allegations that ‘Master William Covyll . . . a bachelor of sacred theology, and a fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge’, had been conducting an adulterous affair with one Bridget Edmunds while her husband John, a Cambridge M.A., was out of the house seeing plays. A former servant alleged that on at least one occasion Covell had stayed upstairs with Bridget Edmunds for the whole night. But this unsavoury business may not have been known to Covell’s London patrons.14 One of Covell’s Cambridge pupils, John Weever, is even more significant as an early admirer of Shakespeare. His comments and responses are more numerous and much fuller than those of his tutor. Like Covell, Weever grew up in Lancashire; and like both Meres and Covell, he came to his college, Queens’, as a ‘sizar’. This was a form of scholarship that required its holder to perform some of the duties of a college servant. E.A.J. Honigmann has suggested that it was from Weever that Covell learned about the talented Shakespeare. But that scenario depended on the now refuted theory that Shakespeare, aged eighteen, spent a year at Hoghton Hall in Lancashire.15 Influence, if any, probably travelled

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Fig. 6. John Weever, one of Shakespeare’s admirers.

the other way. But Shakespeare’s writings were so popular by the later 1590s that admiration for them did not require personal recommendation.

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Weever’s sonnet ‘Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare’, included in his Epigrammes (1599), is remarkable as the earliest poetic tribute to encompass both Shakespeare’s poems and his dramatic writings. Weever is hazy about the exact nature of his theatrical output, suggesting that at the time of writing he had not read Palladis Tamia, with its list of twelve named and attributed plays. First invoked by Weever as the poetic offspring of ‘Honie-tong’d Shakespeare’ are the long poems, to each of which he devotes two lines: Rose-cheekt Adonis with his amber tresses, Faire fire-hot Venus charming him to love her, Chaste Lucretia virgine-like her dresses, Prowd lust-stung Tarquine seeking still to prove her: He then tucks in a single line on Shakespeare’s plays: ‘Romea Richard; more whose names I know not’. It would be nice to know whether Weever’s ‘Richard’ alludes to Richard III or Richard II, but this seems impossible to determine. Both plays were in print; neither had Shakespeare’s name on the title-page. Weever’s Epigrammes were not published until 1599, but many individual poems in the volume, including the one addressed to William Covell, seem to have been written while he was still in Cambridge, from April 1594 to April 1598. It is likely therefore that Weever’s uncertainty about the full extent and subject matter of Shakespeare’s dramatic output derived from his point of contact having been playgoing. Authors’ names did not normally appear on playbills in these years, nor on the title-pages of printed texts, whose descriptions were often closely related to those of playbills. The apparently weak phrase ‘more whose names I know not’ may reflect an honest attempt to give Shakespeare credit for having written various other plays that Weever has seen and enjoyed, but about whose authorship he is not positive. Weever’s sonnet eulogizing Shakespeare is immediately followed by a eulogistic epigram to Edward Alleyn which identifies the actor with the great Roman player ‘Roscius’ and London with ‘Rome’. This strongly suggests an active habit of playgoing:

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Epig. 23 In Ed: Allen. Rome had her Roscius and her Theater, Her Terence, Plautus, Ennius and Me[n]ander, The first to Allen, Phoebus did transfer The next, Thames Swans receiv’d fore he coulde land her, Of both more worthy we by Phoebus doome, Then t’Allen Roscius yeeld, to London Rome.16 Weever is unlikely to have praised Alleyn unless he had seen him perform, and his suggestion that for physical theatres London was now more splendid even than ancient Rome reflects a broader enthusiasm. Taken together, the Shakespeare and Alleyn epigrams indicate that Weever had seen plays performed by both of the leading companies, Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men and Alleyn’s Lord Admiral’s. His confident boast that London now has a ‘Theater’ even better than that of Rome may allude to the construction of the new Globe in 1599, but more probably to the repaired and improved Rose of the mid-1590s. Earlier in the same section, Epigram 9, ‘In Eripham vetulam’, is a disagreeable gibe at an ugly old woman – an ‘old trot’ – who crosses the Thames ‘every day . . . to see a play’. The epigrammatist’s revulsion at her ‘withered ore-worne face’ and dreadful complexion, combined confusingly with lavish use of perfumes, derives from personal proximity, as indicated in the last two lines: Her foulenesse makes me oft mine eies up close, Her sweetnes makes me wish I were all Nose.17 The speaker, like the old woman, appears to be a regular visitor to the playhouses on the South Bank of the Thames. Weever’s years at Cambridge overlapped with those of Henry Peacham, and it is theoretically possible that in some university vacation Weever saw the very same performance of Titus Andronicus of which Peacham made a visual and verbal record (see above, Chapter 2). Neither young man, perhaps, was aware of the names of this play’s authors. But there is further evidence that Weever was a keenly attentive theatregoer. Like the multiple-authored

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play Sir John Oldcastle, written slightly later, Weever’s poem The Mirror of Martyrs is a response to Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Specifically, both the poem and the play were designed to take advantage of Shakespeare’s original naming of the character as ‘Sir John Oldcastle’. This gave offence to William Brooke, Lord Cobham, a direct descendant of the historical Oldcastle, though perhaps not quite such grave offence as has sometimes been claimed.18 Yet the faux pas was either extremely rash or else very unlucky, since it is likely that 1 Henry IV was written and first performed in 1596–7, during the brief period when Cobham was Lord Chamberlain, and as such, patron of Shakespeare’s company. Neither Weever’s poem on Oldcastle nor the play about him by Drayton and others should necessarily be viewed as antagonistic to Shakespeare or to his writings. Rather, these writers were exploiting the fresh popular interest in the story of the protoProtestant ‘martyr’ Oldcastle that had been triggered by Shakespeare’s freely imagined, fictional, character. All of them drew on Shakespeare, and Weever cites another play by him with evident respect. In the fifth stanza of The Mirror of Martyrs Weever uses an allusion to Julius Caesar to illustrate the instability of popular opinion: The many-headed multitude were drawne By Brutus speach, that Caesar was ambitious, When eloquent Mark Antonie had showne His vertues; who but Brutus then was vicious: Mans memorie with new forgets the old, One tale is good untill another’s told. The phrase ‘Caesar was ambitious’ is a clear allusion to Brutus’s pithy statement that ‘as he was ambitious, I slew him’ (3.2.26–7), later picked up in Antony’s ‘The noble Brutus / Hath told you Caesar was ambitious’ (3.2.78–9), followed by six iterations of ‘ambitious’ or ‘ambition’, usually delivered, in performance, with growing contempt or scepticism. Though not published until 1601, The Mirror appears to have been written towards the end of 1599, very soon after early

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performances of Julius Caesar at the brand-new Globe. In his dedication of it to his former tutor William Covell Weever remarks that the poem some two yeares agoe was made fit for the Print; that so long keeping the corner of my studie, wherein I use to put waste paper: This first trew Oldcastle, thought himselfe injurde, because he might not bee suffered to sustaine the second Martyredome of the Presse. The phrase ‘trew Oldcastle’ applied to Weever’s poem clearly alludes to the earliest versions of 1 and 2 Henry IV, in which Prince Hal’s riotous companion had been falsely so named. In ‘correcting’ Shakespeare’s defamatory portrayal of an early companion to the future Henry V Weever shows his familiarity with the two Henry IV plays, of which he had presumably witnessed early performances in which the name had not yet been changed to ‘Falstaff ’. Far from being an aged corrupter of youth with attendant riff-raff, Weever’s historical Oldcastle was a virtuous young courtier who on his own behalf sought out ‘No meane Cumrades, no base associates’. However, though both valiant and virtuous, Oldcastle has lately fallen victim to the world’s ‘swaggering humour’: A wynd-swolne monster, many headed Rumour Vices preserver, virtues festred rot. Weever deplores the recent defamation of the ‘trew Oldcastle’ while glancing at Shakespeare’s own use of an allegorical figure of ‘Rumour’, a mine of misinformation, as prologue to 2 Henry IV. In the poem’s closing stanza Weever shows that he is well aware that his friend Drayton and other ‘Poets’ are currently at work on a play about Oldcastle. He bestows a valedictory blessing both on the forthcoming play and its performers, the Lord Admiral’s Men: Wit, spend thy vigour, Poets, wits quintessence, Hermes make great the worlds eies with teares;

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Actors make sighes a burden for each sentence: That he may sob which reades, he swound which heares. Mean time, till life in death you do renew, Wits, Poets, Hermes, Actors, all adew. This is richly revealing of Weever’s omnivorous cultural appetites. As we have seen, he enjoyed attending plays both by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and by the Lord Admiral’s. Here, he welcomes both forms of historical narrative, published and performed. He cherishes such narratives especially for their affective power: ‘That he may sob which reades, he swound which heares.’ If anything, Weever rates the affective power of live performance even more highly than that of the written word, for while the former may provoke the reader to ‘sob’, the latter may even cause the playhouse auditor to ‘swound’ (faint). Overall, Weever’s Mirror of Martyrs comes across not so much as a rebuke to Shakespeare as an indirect homage to him. It is essentially a spinoff, and only works regarded as highly original and successful provoke spin-offs. The starting-point of a spin-off is the assumption that the work to which it relates is familiar to everyone. Nevertheless, of course, Shakespeare himself may have found Weever’s morally superior tone quite irritating. I have left until last the most extraordinary of Weever’s three 1599–1600 compositions. Faunus and Melliflora, OR, The original of our English Satyres appears to have been published at the very end of 1599, for its closing item is ‘A Prophesie of this present yeare, 1600’. He uses New Style dating, since he alludes, satirically, to the new reign of ‘Vertue’ in England that begins ‘this first of Janivere’. The book is dedicated to Edward Stanley of Winwick, and an inscribed copy was perhaps presented to him in person if Weever spent the 1599–1600 Christmas holidays in his native Lancashire. It is prefaced by a sonnet ‘Of the Author’ by M[ichael] D[rayton], Latin verses ‘In Laudem Authoris’ by an R.H. who may be Sir Richard Hoghton, English verses by an unidentified I.F., and further sonnets by T.H. and I.W., the last commending the poem to Master Thomas Bromley of Deerfolde.

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The book’s main item, Faunus and Melliflora, is an extended epyllion in rhyming couplets. It is heavily derivative from Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Sidney’s Arcadia, and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Venus and Adonis. These influences are manifested in imagery, style and specific descriptive details, such as the heavily Sidneian account of Faunus’s clothes (49f.) An extended game of barley break played by Faunus with two other youths and three nymphs also derives from Sidney.19 By the end of this game Faunus has fallen in love with the nymph Melliflora, and she leads him deeper and deeper into the woods, running swiftly without looking back. As he runs after her Faunus finds that he in turn is being pursued by ‘The anger-froathing boare’, which he succeeds in killing, even though ‘He was but armed with a little knife’ (465). From this point on Weever draws on, and in effect rewrites, Venus and Adonis. His borrowings from Shakespeare’s poem are closely connected to its central narrative, and he also mimics Shakespeare’s style and tone. Lost in the wood, Faunus finds ‘Love-sicke Adonis lying on the ground’. However, contrary both to Ovidian myth and to Shakespeare’s account, Adonis has not been killed by the savage boar, but by Cupid’s dart. Somewhat absurdly, Adonis has caught a single glimpse of the fleeing Melliflora, and as a result, ‘strooke with loves arrow, he fell downe and dide’. Venus then encounters Faunus, and believes him to be Adonis, this time perhaps receptive to her love: ‘Welcome Adonis, in thy lovelie breast, / Now do I see remorse and pitie rest’ (483–4). She strips off most of her clothes, and prepares to kiss him, wooing him in lines only slightly adapted from Shakespeare’s. Finally, she takes off ‘all to the Ivorie skinne’ (503). Yet still ‘Faunus resisted’. Venus therefore abandons her wooing, and Mounted as before In her light chariot drawne with milke-white Doves Away she flies. (510–12) Weever compresses most of the essentials of Shakespeare’s narrative into about sixty lines: Venus’s passion for the mortal youth;

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Adonis’s reluctance; the threat to Adonis posed by the boar; Adonis’s death, and Venus’s final departure for Paphos in a dovedrawn chariot. But having defined his hero Faunus as a reincarnation and lookalike of Shakespeare’s Adonis, Weever proceeds to send him off in some quite different directions. Faunus’s next encounter is with his father, Picus (= magpie), who delivers a savage speech against love in general and women in particular. Discovering that this advice is too late, for Faunus is already passionately in love, Picus then urges him to marry. This doesn’t work, either. Faunus puts on special wooing clothes, white decorated with gold embroidery, and goes back into the woods to look for Melliflora. She is in a state of intense grief, believing that Faunus has been killed by the boar. Eventually she finds Faunus asleep, though at first mistakes him for Adonis. Once she realizes that the sleeping youth is indeed Faunus she kisses and caresses his somnolent body. Weever provides his readers with a version of Shakespeare’s titillating scenario in which a woman actively woos an apparently unresponsive youth. But at last, ‘Faunus awakt, and Venus thought she was’ – i.e. Faunus mistakes Melliflora for Venus, just as Melliflora had mistaken Faunus for Adonis. The appropriation of Shakespeare’s characters could hardly be more blatant. Shakespeare appears to have read this poem, so full of echoes of his own writings, with some attention. Whether he felt more flattered or irritated by Weever’s adaptation of Venus and Adonis is impossible to tell. But it seems likely that he took a keen interest in a poem closely modelled on his own written by a man who had already praised him in print. Evidence that he did so was provided by Arnold Davenport in his edition of Faunus and Melliflora. He pointed out that three words used by Faunus in the long wooing speech which follows the reunion of the lovers described above – ‘nun’, ‘nymph’ and ‘orisons’ – appear to have been picked up by Shakespeare in the ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ scene in Hamlet (3.1.88, 3.1.120): 919–25. Nunne . . . faire nymph . . . Orizons. . . . it is worth remarking that Melliflora is in fact a Nymph,

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whereas the word is applied somewhat unexpectedly to Ophelia; that it is plausible that Shakespeare, having been praised in Weever’s Epigrammes . . . was interested enough to look at Weever’s next publication; and that his attention was arrested on this passage of Faunus by the echoes in it of his own Love’s Labour’s Lost.20 Davenport also notes that the words ‘chameleon’ and ‘huggermugger’ occur both in the Faunus and Melliflora volume and in Hamlet (3.2.89; 4.5.84). The point of Faunus and Melliflora, as a fictionally shaped myth of origin, is to explain, as Weever said in the full title, ‘the original of our English Satyres’. The union of the lovers produces offspring in the form of a small satyr, who embodies the newborn genre of literary satire. This genre, ‘Lashing and biting Venus luxurie’, is fiercely antagonistic to amorous writings. This satirical outcome appears remote from that of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Yet in so far as Shakespeare’s Venus finally prophesies that ‘Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend’ (VA 1135–64) there is a structural parallel between Weever’s poem and Shakespeare’s, for both are erotic narratives whose conclusions are decidedly anti-erotic. Within Weever’s book, the bitter conclusion of Faunus functions as a link to the four poems which follow: translations of Horace’s first Satire, Persius’s first Satire, and Juvenal’s first Satire, accompanied by a promise that Weever will eventually translate all three poets’ Satires in full; and fourthly and finally, his most topical and original poem, ‘A Prophesie of this present yeare, 1600’. With heavy sarcasm, he predicts that the coming year – and century – will be so virtuous, and so free from folly and vice, that satirists will lack material. He himself went on to write a particularly bitter satire against satirists, The Whipping of the Satyre (1601).21 This poem includes allusions both to Shakespeare’s Richard III (‘A man, a man, a kingdome for a man’) and to Sir John Falstaff and John of Gaunt.22 The Richard III line also caught the eye of John Marston (see below, p. 232).

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Overall, Weever’s responses to Shakespeare’s writings appear conflicted. Though I have argued that his Mirror of Martyrs can be seen as a homage to Shakespeare rather than a rebuke, he may not have intended it as such. Weever’s subsequent career, as a diligent antiquarian scholar, took him some distance from Shakespeare’s sweet verse and cogent drama. He recorded verses on the Stanley tomb at Tong which may be Shakespeare’s, as well as the cursing verse on Shakespeare’s own grave in Stratford.23 Yet in so far as there was a ‘war’ between Shakespeare and Jonson, Weever appears to have been one of Jonson’s sidekicks, not Shakespeare’s.24 The rest of this chapter is devoted to Henry Chettle, a master stationer and non-graduate, whose responses to Shakespeare were even more markedly conflicted than those of John Weever. Chettle’s ‘Greene’-voiced attack on Shakespeare in 1592, followed by his speedy apology and eulogy, were discussed in Chapter 1. His vacillations between admiration and rebuke were to continue. Though always elusive, Henry Chettle can be identified as a writer of distinct talent. He was praised by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia as one of ‘the best for Comedy amongst us’. He was an exceptionally prolific playwright, whom Henslowe’s records connect with the composition of forty-nine plays between 1598 and 1603.25 He seems to have had a hand in yet more plays that were either not connected with Henslowe, or were written earlier. In the only book-length study of Chettle written to date, Harold Jenkins remarked that ‘Chettle has long lacked a recognition which is his due as a lyric poet of a distinctly high order.’26 His contributions to plays of which he was a co-author seem often to have included songs. One of these, the lullaby ‘Golden Slumbers’, occurs in Patient Grissill, co-written with Thomas Dekker and William Haughton towards the end of 1599. Even today it is fairly well known, though probably few now associate it with Chettle. A poetical miscellany published in 1600, Englands Helicon, includes four poems attributed to ‘H.C.’. One derives from Chettle’s 1595 book Piers Plainnes seaven yeres Prentiship, and it is likely that the other three poems are also

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Chettle’s, perhaps extracted from books or plays now lost. Jenkins endorses Chettle’s authorship of all of four ‘H.C.’ items. The most ambitious of these four poems, ‘The Sheepheards Song of Venus and Adonis’, is a charming lyric in an unusual trochaic metre. It reprises the Venus and Adonis myth as interpreted by Shakespeare, figuring a juvenile and unresponsive Adonis: He with blushing red Hangeth downe the head, not a kisse can he afford . . . I am now too young to be wunne by beauty, Tender are my yeeres I am yet a bud. It is clear that Shakespeare’s poem, with which there are one or two verbal links, is the model for ‘The Sheepheards Song’. Yet its overall effect is quite different, with the focus here on Adonis rather than Venus, and on emotions rather than narrative.27 In an epistle to Nashe incorporated in the latter’s Have with you to Saffron-walden Chettle described himself as ‘but an Artificer’.28 In his own person he certainly had insufficient status to be able to give the lie to Gabriel Harvey, a senior academic. However, he could provide technical support to Cambridgegraduate Nashe in his eloquent print-published onslaughts. As John Jowett has shown, after a quarrel between the printers John Danter and William Hoskins in 1591 Chettle had been left stranded as ‘a printer without a shop’ (i.e. work-shop),29 and his chief occupation thereafter was that of ‘corrector to the press’. This was work that, as Jowett observes, ‘did not carry prestige’. Yet Henry Chettle appears to have been temperamentally rather well suited to this kind of behind the scenes work. It required him to improve the quality and accuracy of other men’s writings while seldom either revealing his own presence or exposing himself to criticism. This was already apparent in Groatsworth. Using the voice of a celebrated writer who boasted of being ‘Master of Arts of both Universities’ Chettle thought he could safely attack the

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players, and label non-graduate Shakespeare an ‘upstart’. But in truth, Chettle himself was something of an upstart. Again and again, he went far beyond what was expected of a man whose job was supposedly that of a mere copy-editor – tidying up dead Greene’s messy drafts – and/or ‘corrector of the press’. There are several ways in which, five years later, Chettle was implicated in the production of the first, ‘bad’, quarto of Romeo and Juliet in 1596. He is known to have been closely involved with John Danter, its publisher and chief printer. He seems to have been responsible for preparing parts of the text both in the segments printed by Danter and those printed by Edward Allde. As a master printer, he may also have acted as a compositor in setting up pages of type. But his role appears to have extended yet further. The short scene in which the lovers are betrothed in Friar Laurence’s cell is, as Lukas Erne observes, ‘almost entirely independent of Q2’.30 It may be an imaginative memorial reconstruction of an early version, and/or it may be an original composition that is entirely Chettle’s work. It is notable for richly descriptive stage directions – ‘Enter Juliet somewhat fast, and embraceth Romeo’ – and for the use of vivid rhyming couplets throughout, such as Friar Laurence’s comment on Juliet’s vividly evoked entrance: So light of foot ne’er hurts the trodden flower. Of love and joy, see, see the sovereign power. Both Chettle and his close friend Anthony Munday had a particular fondness for writing rhyming couplets.31 As was his wont, it seems that Chettle here went well beyond what might be expected from a man whose professional role was confined to that of a ‘corrector of the press’ and compositor.32 There are further, and even more perplexing, instances of Chettle functioning as a co-author alongside Shakespeare. He was both one of the original authors of the play Sir Thomas More, along with his friend Anthony Munday, and one of its seven scribes/revisers, along with Shakespeare, in the early 1600s. It is hard to believe that the production of this complex revised version did not entail physical meetings between the various

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revisers. In any case, as suggested in Chapter 1 (p. 45), Chettle and Shakespeare had apparently encountered each other in the autumn of 1592, and were therefore acquaintances, even if not friends, from then on. Around the time of the revision of More came Chettle’s sole-authored play for the Lord Admiral’s Men, The Tragedy of Hoffman, which is evidently designed to appeal to audiences as a counterpart to Hamlet, despite rather few verbal links. The play’s subtitle, ‘A revenge for a Father’, its Northern European/Baltic setting, and the virtuoso scenes of Lucibella’s madness, all invite recollections of Hamlet. Not surprisingly, given his especially intimate knowledge of that play, there are also at least two possible echoes of Romeo and Juliet. Austria is told of the death of his daughter the day before her expected nuptials: ‘Austria your daughter is become a bride for death: the dismall even before her wedding day’ (Hoffman, 1004–5; cf. RJ 4.5.35–6); and the foolish Prince Jerome comments on his own death, ‘indeede I meant to poyson him, but I have pepperd my selfe’ (Hoffman, 1573–4; cf. RJ 3.1.100). The use of ‘peppered’ in the sense of ‘fatally injured’ is distinctive. Chettle’s interactions with Shakespeare are too numerous and too complex to be explored here in full. Other scholars, most notably John Jowett, have looked closely at Q1 Romeo and Juliet, More and Hoffman, and further insights will surely emerge from their studies. The only text that I shall examine in detail here is the much less considered Englandes mourning garment, published twice by Thomas Millington in 1603. This was Chettle’s most sustained and visible publication, and by far his most successful. A pirated edition by Matthew Lawe was called in by the Stationers.33 Mourning garment is one of the most ambitious of the dozens of publications that appeared in the weeks immediately following the death of Elizabeth on 24 March 1603. Like most of the authors of these works, Chettle saw the moment as a major opportunity to appeal for patronage. He hoped to emulate his old friend Anthony Munday in writing for a city company. In a passage in which he praises the city companies for their charitable foundations he concludes that

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among all, the right Worshipfull the Merchant-Tailors have exceeded the rest: all have done well that have done anie thing, but they the best of any other, as I will one day in a song of liberall Shepheards thankfully expresse.34 Chettle was no doubt aware that the current Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Lee, was a Merchant Taylor. Anthony Munday had been paid the very large sum of £30 30s. for preparing the pageant that greeted Lee’s inauguration, whose expenses included ‘provyding apparel for all the Children in the pageant, ship, Lyon and Camell’ – these being the images that figure in the Merchant Taylors’ coat of arms.35 As well as elegiac and celebratory verse, Mourning garment includes a short biography of the Queen and a full account of the ‘order and proceeding’ of the funeral procession that accompanied her body to Westminster Abbey on 28 April 1603. This item gives the book the appearance of an official publication, and may be a reason for its popularity, though two other books published at this time also included similar accounts of the funeral.36 Chettle’s account was supplemented in the second edition with a list of the twelve barons who bore ‘bannerols’. John Jowett suggests that Chettle confesses ‘his own failure’ in Mourning garment when he calls upon other, abler, writers, including Shakespeare, to lament the death of the Queen.37 I read this differently. For one thing, since the book either post-dates or coincides with the day of the Queen’s funeral, it marks the close of the official period of mourning and the beginning of the phase of festive celebration of the new King’s accession. Poets who had not got round to mourning Elizabeth by the time of James’s arrival in London and Westminster in early May had left it too late. Unlike Jowett, again, I discern the hand of Chettle the moral ‘corrector’ at work throughout the book, not being confined to the often-cited poem (to be referred to as ‘Death now’) in which he explicitly rebukes leading poets. For instance, his dedicatory epistle ‘To all true Lovers of the right gracious Queene Elizabeth, in her life’ closes with a sharp rebuke to others who have

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failed in their duty. Bidding ‘Farewell’ to those who mourn the Queen, he concludes ‘the rest are Time-pleasers, and I write not to them’. Chettle’s true name does not occur until the end of the penultimate item in the first printing of Englandes mourning garment, and doesn’t appear at all in the second. But the motto with which the dedication is concluded, Faelicem fuisse infaustum, is a bit of a giveaway, for this motto had appeared also on the title-page and, twice, at the end, of Groatsworth back in 1592.38 Shakespeare, survivor of the poets attacked in that work, would have been quick to spot this identifying detail. Though politely modest about his own ‘rude’ style, Chettle is not at all modest in appropriating both the name and the poetic mantle of the ‘excellent and cunning Collin’, that is, Edmund Spenser, who had died in September 1599. He identifies himself with the writer who had the strongest claim to be described as Elizabeth’s poet laureate, taking it on himself to write the kind of work that Spenser might supposedly have written had he lived. The book’s main item is Englandes mourning garment: Worne heere by plaine Shepheards, in memorie of their sacred Mistresse, ELIZABETH; Queene of Vertue while she lived, and Theame of Sorrow, being dead. It opens with a verse dialogue between ‘Thenot’ (Munday?) and ‘Collin’ (Chettle) which derives from the February eclogue of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), a dialogue between mature Thenot and youthful Colin. This leads to an extended prose narrative incorporating ‘Death now’, a poem in thirteen six-line stanzas in which ‘Collin’ rebukes various poets for their lack of loyalty to the dead Queen. He then resumes his eulogistic memoir of Elizabeth, concluding it with a four-voiced ‘Funerall Song’ and epitaphs supposedly composed by each of the same four speakers. In the opening section Thenot interrogates Collin about why he seems so unhappy, rather than being joyously ‘preparde to welcome May’ – that is, May 1603, the season of the new King’s accession. Collin’s immediate response is that ‘she cannot be had / That me and mine did glad’, alluding to the death of Elizabeth.

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But Thenot also touches on other, more private, miseries relating to Collin’s interactions with lowlier individuals: let me thy sorrow ken, Rich soule, though wrong’d by idle Antike men, And driven by falshood to a cloudie den. This recalls a phrase in Groatsworth, ‘those Anticks garnisht in our colours’. Eleven years on, it seems that Chettle still, or again, feels himself to be ‘wrong’d’ by ‘antics’, that is, players. Philip Henslowe’s records show that in 1602–3 Chettle received payments for promised work on a two-part play ‘called the London florentyn’, work on a play called ‘Ladey Jane’ (in collaboration with Heywood, ‘mr smythe’, and Webster), and for further, unnamed, plays.39 Despite all this promised activity, he was deeply in debt, and frequently required large loans from Henslowe. Thenot’s lines suggest that he held the players, ‘idle Antike men’, most to blame for his troubles. In 1598 Chettle was twice imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea, a ‘cloudie den’ if ever there was one.40 Thenot’s lines provide a hitherto overlooked suggestion that he may have endured a further spell of imprisonment in 1602–3. He had certainly appeared before a court in the winter of 1600–1, when he was accused, together with James Abell and Jonas Bodenham, of having libelled Paul Bayning, a senior but troublesome London alderman.41 I wonder whether the alleged libel was delivered in the form of a play written or part-written by Chettle. Neil Carson has shown that Chettle’s earnings from playwriting in 1601–2 were £25 5s., and remarks that: This income was certainly adequate (better by far than he could have hoped to win by his pen in any other field). But it may have seemed inadequate to an ambitious individual surrounded on all sides by displays of ostentatious wealth.42 Thenot perhaps addresses his friend as a ‘Rich soule’ precisely because he himself was so far from ‘rich’ in material terms.

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‘Collin’/Chettle declares himself enraged that ‘Bayards and beasts accurst, with grosest flattery nurst’ presume to sing ‘her sacred name’.43 However, Thenot defends such humble but truehearted writers, and identifies the true villains as those genuinely gifted poets who have chosen to remain silent: Those that can sing, have done all Shepheards wrong, Like Lozels44 in their cottages to lurke: The ayre’s the ayre, though it be thicke and murke. If they to whom true Pastorals belong, In needefull layes, use neither pipe nor tong, Shall none the vertuous raise? As a whole, the opening dialogue recalls Spenser’s Teares of the Muses, rewritten in the manner of a Shepheardes Calender eclogue. After attempting to eulogize sacred ‘Eliza’ in verse, ‘Collin in discontent, brake his pipe’, and falls senseless to the ground. This recalls Colin/Spenser in the January eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender: ‘So broke his oaten Pype, and downe did lye’ (72). The collapse of ‘Collin’/Chettle is described in third-person prose: ‘Poore Th[enot]. showted for help’. Nymphs and shepherds abandon their flocks in order to gather round the comatose Collin. Eventually the latter revives, and after more weeping, begins to speak. He breaks the news to the assembled company that they have ‘lost that sacred Nymph, that carefull Shepheardesse ELIZA’, and promises that ‘he would repeate somthing of her, worth memorie, that should live in despite of death’. The ensuing account has some claim to be the earliest printed biography of Elizabeth I, and deserves to be better known. Chettle handles his narrative with some discernment. In an image reminiscent of ‘butchery’ passages in 2 and 3 Henry VI discussed in the Prologue he remarks that until the union of Henry of Lancaster (Henry VII) with Elizabeth of York, England was a shambles of slaughtred men: so violent was the blood of ambition, so potent the factions, and so implacable their heads, whose eyes were never cleard till

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they were washt in blood, even in the deare blood of their Objects hearts. (A4v) Elizabeth’s younger brother Edward VI is eulogized as ‘no Infant in vertues’. Remarkably, Chettle bestows nothing but praise on their elder sister Mary. Thenot interrupts Collin at this point, ‘telling him, there were a number of true shepheards misliked that Princes life, and joyed greatly at her death’. But Collin will have none of this. He defends the duty of subjects to speak loyally of their rightful monarchs. An ensuing anecdote, apparently overlooked by his modern biographers, suggests that Chettle at some point visited Scotland – perhaps on business as a stationer. Illustrating the tendency of some subjects not only to ‘bite the dead’, but even to speak ill of reigning monarchs, he reports on his own experience: myselfe have seene and hearde with glowing eares some of them, even in the fields of Calydon, when his Excellence, that is now our Emperiall Shepheard, was onely Lord of their foldes, speake of his Majestie more audaciouslie & malapertly, than any of us would doe of the meanest officer.45 ‘Calydon’ must refer to Caledonia, or Scotland, given the ensuing allusion to the man ‘that is now our Emperiall Shepheard’. Chettle here underscores his own undeviating loyalty both to dead Elizabeth and newly acceded James, while suggesting that the latter will find his English subjects – ‘us’ – considerably more respectful of royal authority than his Scottish ones. However, in so far as there is a sense here both of boasting and of tale-bearing, Collin/Chettle comes over as rather a creep. Collin/Chettle celebrates the miracle of Elizabeth’s peaceful rule. She was blessed by God, as revealed in ‘her victories’, always ascribed by her to divine power. For instance, ‘after the dissipation of the Spanish Armatho accounted invincible, shee came in person to Paules crosse, and there, among the meanest of her

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people, confessed, Non nobis Domine, non nobis; sed nomini tuo Gloria.’ 46 Collin declares himself unqualified to discuss the Queen’s relations with Spain. But Thenot implores him, as someone who has had some contact with courtly poets, to comment on her foreign policy: for thee47 hast heard the songs of that warlike Poet Philisides, good Meliboee, and smooth tongued Melicert; tell us what thou hast observed in their sawes, seene in thy owne experience; and heard of undoubted truthes touching those accidents. (B3r) ‘Philisides’ must allude to Philip Sidney, this being one of his fictional aliases. Sidney died in 1586, two years before the Armada, and was out of England for the last twelve months of his life. At the time when Sidney left England for the Netherlands Chettle had only just completed his apprenticeship, so this allusion is probably to ‘Collin’ as someone who has read Sidney’s ‘songs’, or poems, all of them now being in print, rather than to any personal contact. After his death in 1590 Sidney’s father-in-law Sir Francis Walsingham was eulogized by Thomas Watson as ‘Meliboeus’.48 Walsingham would certainly be a first-rate source of wisdom concerning Elizabethan foreign policy. However, Chettle may allude to Watson’s poem ‘of ’, or concerning, ‘good Meliboee’, rather than to any direct contact of Collin’s with Walsingham when alive. Even more tantalizing is the phrase ‘smooth tongued Melicert’. In the poem beginning ‘Death now hath ceaz’d her in his ycie armes’ it is evident that ‘silver tonguèd Melicert’ must mean Shakespeare, author of The Rape of Lucrece. The ‘Melicert’ mentioned here by Thenot seems similar in being characterized as ‘smooth tongued’. There is probably a note of sarcasm in this phrase, for ‘smooth-tongued’ (OED a) is defined as ‘Smooth or plausible in speech; using fair or flattering words; smoothspoken’. Indeed, there seem to be no instances of the phrase carrying positive connotations until the mid-seventeenth century.

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Both Spenser and Shakespeare use it in the sense of ‘specious’.49 There is a further point that suggests that ‘Melicert’ may allude to Shakespeare here, as the name clearly does later. In ‘Death now’ Chettle blames Melicert for his failure ‘To mourne her death that graced his desert, / And to his laies opend her Royall eare’. While other poets, notably Daniel, are mentioned as having praised Elizabeth while she was alive, only ‘Melicert’/Shakespeare is specifically described as having been ‘graced’ by her. The ‘Melicert’ of the prose passage appears also to be a man who has had some contact with the court, and is therefore in a position to report with authority on the Queen’s dealings with Spain, so it seems likely that this, too, is an allusion to Shakespeare. Collin’s professed desire is that all enmity between England and Spain should be brought to an end – something that was to be high on James’s agenda. His praise of Elizabeth’s wise and merciful dealings with both Spain and Ireland is combined with accounts of her mastery of the cardinal virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity. Her constant ‘Hope’ was finally rewarded in the fact that ‘even when death laide his last siege to her yet unvanquished life, Tyrone, the long disturber of her State, besought by agents50 mercie at her feete’ (C1v). ‘Charity’ was manifested in her daily distribution of alms to the poor and in the support she gave to the foundation of alms-houses. According to Collin/Chettle, ‘there have beene more particular Almes-houses builded for the reliefe of the aged, then in anie sixe Princes Raignes before’. This has been most notable in the City of London and its environs, the latter being illustrated in a tribute to Archbishop Whitgift: above the rest, an honorable, carefull, reverend and learned watchman, as full of mildnesse & pietie, as he is of yeares and griefes for his good and royall Mistresse losse; at Croiden hath builded a worthy Receptacle to the like charitable end.51 As we have seen (Chapter 1, p. 52), there is reason to suspect that Chettle had some personal acquaintance with Whitgift. In calling him a ‘watchman’ he here accords him quasi-angelic status: aptly

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so, given his devoted attendance on Elizabeth’s death-bed. In OED’s sense 3b the term is applied to angels, as in the Geneva Bible version of Daniel 4.13: ‘Beholde, a watcheman and an holy one came downe from heaven’. ‘Collin’/Chettle then offers further examples and anecdotes illustrating Elizabeth’s charity and mercy. Next he praises her skill in languages and quickness in speech, both in prose and verse, including Latin verse. This leads him to comment bitterly on the shameful silence of the major English poets since her death, because of which, rude as I am, I have presumed to handle this excellent Theame, in regard the Funerall hastens on . . . and yet I see none, or at least past one or two that have sung any thing since her departure worth the hearing; and of them, they that are best able, scarce remember her Majestie. (D1r–v) He goes on to quote Spenser’s couplet on the death of the Earl of Leicester from memory: Being dead no Poet seekes him to revive, Though many Poets flattered him alive.52 This provides Collin with a cue for the poem ‘Death now’, in which he delivers extended corrective addresses (under pseudonyms) to ten contemporary poets. Nine of these can now be identified. Among much else, Chettle’s poem is interesting as a roll-call of those English poets considered most gifted at the time of Elizabeth’s death. The first two, Samuel Daniel and William Warner, are presumably so placed because of the patriotic and historical nature of their major projects, which makes it the more shameful that they have failed to commemorate their Queen. Warner has ‘sung fortie yeares her life and birth’, but has failed to mourn her death. However, Chettle is inclined to excuse him: ‘Or else I gesse, he cannot sing, but weepe’. Next comes Chapman (‘Corin’), who ‘finisht dead Musaeus gracious song’ – alluding to his ‘completion’ of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander – and after him, Jonson,

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‘our English Horace’, who ‘Can drawe Characters which will never die’, and who prefers to write satires on the living rather than elegies on the dead. Chettle knew Jonson personally, having collaborated with him in 1598 on a play called Hot Anger Soon Cold.53 They also had a mutual friend in the lately dead Thomas Nashe. Fifth is Shakespeare: Nor doth the silver tongued Melicert, Drop from his honied Muse one sable teare To mourne her death that gracèd his desert, And to his laies opend her Royall eare. Shepheard remember our Elizabeth, And sing her Rape, done by that Tarquin, Death. (D3r) Chettle typifies Shakespeare by The Rape of Lucrece because the poem is focused on a virtuous woman, and shows the poet in a deeply reflective and solemn vein throughout. Jonson may perhaps be excused, for his natural vein is satiric, but Shakespeare has no such excuse. A man who could write such a poem as Lucrece was supremely well qualified to elegize the chaste and virtuous Elizabeth. He also, it seems, owes Elizabeth special obligations, having written works – presumably plays – that she received with attention. This suggestion is explored in detail in the next chapter (pp. 194–6). The phrases ‘silver tongued’ and ‘honied Muse’ are sarcastic, suggesting fluency of language that is charming but deceitful. Unlike ‘smooth-tonguèd’ (see above, pp. 179–80), ‘silver-tongued’ normally has positive connotations, as in OED’s first citation of the phrase, from Nashe: ‘Silver tongu’d Smith, whose well tun’d stile hath made thy death the generall teares of the Muses’.54 But this only strengthens the point made in these six lines. Shakespeare is widely recognized as a commanding and versatile writer, which makes it the more shameful that he has failed to mourn his great patroness. Despite the very different social context, there is a definite parallel here to Chettle’s earlier attack on Shakespeare for his failure to lend any succour to the dying Robert Greene, to whom he allegedly owed much of his success.

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The name ‘Melicert’ was familiar to the book’s first readers from Greene’s extremely popular romance Menaphon (1589), where it is the pastoral alias of the heroine’s husband.55 Chettle presumably chose it because its first syllable, ‘Mel’, is the Latin for ‘honey’, an image duplicated in ‘his honied Muse’ in the following line. But while Meres’s praise of ‘hony-tongued Shakespeare’ was eulogistic, Chettle’s deployment of metaphors of sweetness in the context of a rebuke suggests that the rhetorical sweetness of Shakespeare’s writing is excessive and deceptive. Indeed, Shakespeare’s own writings provide confirming evidence that an association of language with ‘honey’ activated suggestions of falsity and flattery. In Richard III the unhappy Anne looks back on Richard’s wooing of her: my woman’s heart Grossly grew captive to his honey words And proved the subject of mine own soul’s curse. (R3 4.1.78–80) In Julius Caesar (5.1.34–5) Cassius addresses Antony and implies that his speeches expressing love for Caesar and grief at his death were excessive and false: ‘for your words, they rob the Hybla bees, / And leave them honeyless’. An analogous passage in Love’s Labour’s Lost will be discussed in the next chapter. Closest in time to Mourning garment, Ophelia laments the overthrow of Hamlet’s ‘noble mind’, calling herself ‘of ladies most deject and wretched, / That sucked the honey of his musicked vows’ (Ham 3.1.154–5). Eleven years earlier, Chettle had called Shakespeare an ‘upstart Crow’. In 1603 he more openly characterizes Shakespeare as a self-serving flatterer. In the following stanza, Chettle’s address to Michael Drayton as ‘sweet singer Coridon’, seems, in contrast, friendly and mild: ‘Make some amends, I know thou lov’dst her well’. However, in the closing couplet he delivers a specific rebuke: Thinke twas a fault to have thy Verses seene Praising the King, ere they had mourn’d the Queen.

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Drayton had already published A Gratulatorie poem to welcome James, and in 1604 he was to compose A paean triumphal welcoming the King to the City on behalf of the Goldsmiths. However, according to Anne Lake Prescott, ‘James ignored Drayton and his flattery’, and soon ‘Disillusion with the new regime . . . sharpened Drayton’s bite’.56 Perhaps he did indeed err in praising James while omitting to mourn Elizabeth. But given a drift towards satire that had occurred in Drayton’s writing even before her death, he seems not to have been a natural panegyrist either of a dead monarch or a living one. Under his self-chosen alias of ‘Rowland’, Drayton was identified by Richard Niccols, another elegist of Elizabeth, as the natural successor to Spenser and therefore the man best qualified to mourn the Queen. However, according to Niccols, he has been silenced by lack of patronage: Wher’s Collin Clout, or Rowland now become, That wont to leade our Shepheards in a ring? (Ah me) the first, pale death hath strooken dombe, The latter, none incourageth to sing.57 This passage – apparently overlooked by Drayton’s biographers – may allude to the severe difficulties experienced by Drayton in finding adequate sponsorship for his ambitious Poly-Olbion project. In the next stanza Collin addresses ‘delicious sportive Musidore’ as having ‘resign’d thy wreathe of Bay’. Jenkins reported that ‘It has . . . been argued, but without very much conviction, that Musidore is Lodge, who had abandoned poetry and romance after 1596 in order to devote himself to graver pursuits.’58 But ‘Musidore’, the name of the co-hero of the Arcadia, suggests an individual known to have been a close friend of Sir Philip Sidney. No one could conceivably describe the writings of Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville as ‘delicious’ or ‘sportive’. But these epithets could well be applied to the poems of Sidney’s other close friend, Sir Edward Dyer, who does not appear to have written any further verse after about 1590.59 Sidney bequeathed his books to Greville

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and Dyer, thus singling them out as his two closest friends, at least in terms of shared cultural interests. Only a dozen of Dyer’s poems survive – they appear to have circulated only in manuscript. But according to Gabriel Harvey in 1598, his ‘written devises farr excell most of the sonnets, and cantos in print’.60 As a tenacious if never very successful courtier, Dyer would certainly seem a suitable target for Chettle’s appeal: I know thou canst: and none can better sing Herse songs for her, and Paeans to our King. Next, Chettle rattles through three further poets in a single stanza: Quicke Antihorace though I place thee heere, Together with yong Moelibee thy frend: And Hero’s last Musaeus, all three deere,61 All such whose vertues highly I commend: Prove not ingrate to her that many a time Hath stoopt her Majestie, to grace your rime. These are identified by Jenkins as Thomas Dekker, whose riposte to Jonson’s Poetaster was delivered in Satiromastix, with Jonson as ‘Horace’; John Marston, whom Jonson had coupled with Dekker in Poetaster; and Henry Petowe, who had published The second part of Hero and Leander, a very different kind of continuation from Chapman’s, later in 1598. Apparently stung by Chettle’s rebuke, Petowe did, in fact, go on to publish a short poem mourning Elizabeth and welcoming James. Interestingly, Petowe’s Elizabetha quasi vivens. Eliza’s funerall. A fewe Aprill drops was published by Matthew Lawe, the man who also pirated Chettle’s Mourning garment. There seems to be an element of piracy also in Petowe’s book, for it includes The order . . . at the Funerall in a form virtually identical to Chettle’s in the first edition of Mourning garment except that Petowe has interspersed it with short poems. Petowe acknowledges that his tribute to Elizabeth is late, post-dating her funeral: The last of many, yet not the least of all,

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Sing I a heavie dirdge for our late Queene: And singing, mourne Eliza’s Funerall . . . Each moderne Poet that can make a verse Writes of Eliza, even at their Muses birth. Then why not I weepe on Eliza’s Herse? In the phrase ‘even at their Muses birth’ Petowe probably alludes to the very young poet mentioned by Chettle in the next stanza. In sonnets which follow, Petowe commemorates the funeral: ‘that past: my mourning weedes grow out of fashion.’ However, he describes the ‘Three thousand and od hundred’ mourners who processed, and finally, ‘The lively picture of a late dead Queene’ – that is, the carved and painted effigy of Elizabeth, crowned and in her Parliament robes, that was the climax of the procession. In Petowe we have apparently the one example of a poet who rallied to Chettle’s call – unless, of course, others wrote poems that did not reach print. Finally, and rather puzzlingly, Chettle bestows faint praise on a very young and wholly obscure poet: And thou that scarce has fligd [fledged] thy infant Muse, (I use thine owne word) and commend thee best, In thy proclaiming James: the rest misuse The name of Poetry, with lines unblest; Holding the Muses to be masculine: I quote no such absurditie in thine. Thee doe I thanke for will; thy worke let passe: But wishe some of the former had first writ, That from their Poems like reflecting glasse (Steeld with the puritie of Art and wit) Eliza might have liv’d in every eye, Alwaies beheld till Time and Poems dye. The poem alluded to in the first of these stanzas is likely to be An Elegie upon the death of the high and renowned Princesse, our late Soveraigne ELIZABETH, attributed to ‘J.L.’, or John Lane, who went on to write, among much else, a long verse romance about

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Guy of Warwick and a continuation of Chaucer’s unfinished Squire’s Tale.62 Lane draws attention both to his youth and to the fact that this is his first poem: Mine infant Muse begins but now to creepe, Yet loe already she has learnde to weepe. Like Chettle, Lane is a passionate devotee of the poetry of Spenser, and appeals to shepherdesses to recite ‘the songs of Colin Clout’. In the last lines Lane celebrates James as a second ‘Lyon-heart’, and also as a Phoenix: See how our Phoenix mounts above the skies, And from the neast another Phoenix flyes, How happily before the change did bring A Mayden-Queene, and now a manly King. I have not identified the poet or poets who foolishly believed the Muses to be ‘masculine’. But the real interest of the two stanzas quoted above is that they show Chettle as willing to congratulate a very minor and young poet for having his heart in the right place, thereby heaping yet more reproach on ‘the former’ – the well-known named writers who have failed to elegize Elizabeth. Chettle’s compulsion to rebuke invariably tempers his occasional impulse to praise. ‘Death now’ closes with two stanzas paying tribute to Elizabeth as ‘the Muses Patronesse’ and ‘her brother King’ as her poetic reincarnation. He alone can ‘praise her worth’ adequately. Collin then resumes his eulogistic memoir, but briefly, ‘seeing the Sunne began to dye the West Sea with vermilion tincture’. He boasts that he ‘was borne and brought up in the Religion profest by that most Christian Princesse Elizabeth’. He attacks both the Church of Rome, for neglecting their first love, and teaching traditions of men, ‘in steade of sacred veritie’, and the ill-educated ‘brethren and sisters of the other side’ whom Elizabeth rightly ‘brideled’. She is praised for proclamations restraining greed and drunkenness and for her own personal temperance and lack of

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vanity. She ‘simply trusted to her attendant Ladies for the comelinesse of her attire’, without looking at herself in a glass. To this, ‘Collin’/Chettle bears personal witness: that this is true, Thenot I am the rather perswaded, for that when I was yong, almost thirtie yeares agoe, courting it now and then: I have seene the Ladies make great shift to hide away their looking-glasses if her Majestie had past by their lodgings. If this reminiscence is authentic, it seems to take us back to the beginning of Chettle’s apprenticeship to Thomas East, when he was probably aged seventeen or eighteen. East’s publication of works by Lyly and Spenser, of language manuals, and of English translations of Spanish romances could possibly have brought him and his apprentices into contact with court ladies.63 At one point Thenot interrupts Collin’s eulogy to point out Elizabeth’s failure to build any palaces, ‘wherein her memorie might live’ (E1v). This provokes Collin to a richly poetical praise of her ship-building projects, her fleet finally ‘exceeding any Emperours Navy in the earth’. And coming at last to her death, he reports that ‘The beasts the night that she ended her fate in earth, kept an unwonted bellowing, so that I assure thee Thenot, being assured of her sickenesse, I was troubled . . . with imagination of her death.’ Once again rebuking others who have failed in their duty, Collin calls on ‘absent Schollers to bewaile her’ and soldiers, whom she addressed in person at Tilbury in 1588, to ‘lament her’. Collin and Thenot, paired with the nymphs Dryope and Chloris, finally deliver ‘The Funerall Song’, followed by four epitaphs to be inscribed ‘on this lofty Pine’. The ‘order’ of the funeral ensues. Then, in the first edition only, Chettle sneaks in a petulant and highly characteristic note ‘To the Reader’. Coming immediately after the account of the Queen’s splendid funeral effigy this petty erratum seems an astonishing anticlimax. But by definition the note was added at the last minute, after the rest of the book had been set up in type, and this was apparently the only place where there was sufficient white space:

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I love as little as any man to come in print: but seeing affection hath made me commit this fault, I pray you pardon it; and amend in reading the Printers errors; where being ill acquainted with Poetrie, he hath passed Herowes for Heroes; what ever else seemes harsh, imagine I can write English, and make not the fault mine. Farewell. Hen: Chetle In fact, the error made by the printer was ‘Hewres’ for ‘Heroes’ in the line in ‘Death now’ about Henry Petowe. But perhaps Chettle’s petulant addendum made the printer so nervous that he corrected the mistake, thus making nonsense of the erratum. But the larger points that Chettle conveys here are that he affects the reluctance to ‘come in print’ that would normally be associated with writers of much higher rank; that he is extremely well read in ‘Poetrie’; and that, far from being a mere printer, he is an accomplished and correct writer: ‘imagine I can write English’. I have discussed Mourning garment in detail in order to provide a full context for Chettle’s rebuke to Shakespeare. Evidently, Chettle’s primary aim was to demonstrate his own literary accomplishment and his profound loyalty both to the dead Queen and her successor. But intertwined with these aims is a strong compulsion to rebuke and correct others, whether major poets, such as Shakespeare, or minor artificers, such as the unfortunate compositor employed by Valentine Simmes who was responsible for setting up the poem ‘Death now’. Given Shakespeare’s long acquaintance with Chettle, he probably read Mourning garment, and was irritated by it. This irritation may have provided a spur for those Sonnets which express indifference to great public events, whether the death of the Queen, James’s accession, or the new King’s great progress through London in 1604. In 107 the speaker itemizes recent great events. Line 5, ‘The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured’, alludes to the death of Elizabeth, and in lines 7–8 he mentions the succession, now ‘assured’ in the person of the peace-loving James I. ‘Uncertainties now crown themselves assured, / And peace

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proclaims olives of endless age.’ However, the speaker is concerned only with the new freedom and favour enjoyed by ‘my true love’, and finally, in the power enjoyed by himself, as a poet, to bestow immortality on the one he loves: ‘thou in this shalt find thy monument, / When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.’ Lines earlier in Sonnet 107, ‘Now with the drops of this most balmy time / My love looks fresh . . .’ (9–10), may reflect scrutiny of Mourning garment. In the final item, The Shepheards Spring-Song, Chettle makes much of the season of high spring to early summer during which James came to take up his throne in England, and remarks, four lines from the end, ‘All things looke fresh to greet his excellence’. The phrase ‘look(s) fresh’ sounds fairly commonplace. Yet LION and EEBO searches for the phrase in 1599–1609 throw up only three other examples, one from Jonson, two from Dekker. It is possible that Chettle’s closing lines prompted Shakespeare’s use of the phrase. Both in Sonnet 107 and in 123, in which the speaker declares himself unimpressed by the triumphal arches and ‘pyramids’ constructed in London in March 1604 to welcome James into the City, Shakespeare’s persona is determined to focus exclusively on private, personal relationships, placing his poetic gifts entirely at their service. In Sonnet 125 he declares himself indifferent to public ceremonial and the dangerous climate of the court, caring only about his relationship with the individual whom he loves. It would be going much too far to claim that these sonnets would not have been written without Chettle’s reprimand to Shakespeare for failing to write ‘public’ verse declaring devotion to dead Elizabeth and living James. Yet the Sonnet-speaker’s firm and repeated assertions that private friendship is all that he cares about, whether as a man or a poet, do form a kind of riposte to Chettle’s published reproaches. By the time of the publication of the Sonnets in 1609 Chettle was dead. We know this because his friend and former collaborator Thomas Dekker repackaged his Nashean fantasia Newes from Hell (1606) as A knights Conjuring (1607). He dedicated the book to a different patron and added a new closing section set in the

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Elysian fields, in refreshing contrast to the ‘hellish’ location of the rest. Here, he describes English poets, led by Chaucer and Spenser. In another part of the bay-tree grove Marlowe, Greene and Peele repose ‘under the shades of a large vyne’, suggesting the agreeable environment of a tavern garden. They laugh at Nashe, who continues, even in the next world, to inveigh bitterly ‘against dry-fisted Patrons’ and the barbarism of the age. As soon as Nashe has finished his tirade, ‘in comes Chettle sweating and blowing, by reason of his fatnes, to welcome whom, because hee was of olde acq uaintance, all rose up, and fell presentlie on their knees, to drinck a health to all the Lovers of Hellicon.’ Dekker’s Chettle is thus welcomed to the poets’ Elysium as a well-loved companion and productive fellow writer. Chettle had also been ‘of olde acq uaintance’ to Shakespeare. But there is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare either felt or voiced grief at the demise of the man who had paradoxically assisted his early fame by libelling him. Chettle had repeatedly accused Shakespeare of failing to remember the dead. G iven that we don’t even have an elegy by Shakespeare on the death of his own son, it is not surprising that we also have no elegy by him on any fellow poet. The sidelong glances at Marlowe discussed in the previous chapter (pp. 137–42) appear to be the closest he came to such memorials. But remembering the dead continued to be Chettle’s stock-in-trade. What appears to be his final publication, loyally signed off with the words ‘Henry Chettle. God save the King.’, is a broadsheet list of the numbers of those who died of the plague in London, Westminster and Norwich in the summer of 1603, up to 6 October, preceded by a historical account of ancient and modern plagues. If that were Chettle’s only surviving publication we would never guess that its writer was a man who studied Shakespeare’s works closely and knew him personally.

SIX GROOM OF THE CHAMBER touchstone Wast ever in court, shepherd? corin No, truly. touchstone Then thou art damned. (AYL 3.2.30–33) A groom of her chamber my Willy was made To wait upon her grace . . . (Richard Tarlton, ‘A pretty new ballad entitled “Willy and Peggy” ’)

In this chapter I shall discuss three of Shakespeare’s comedies which appear to have connections, both internal and external, to the Elizabethan court: Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor. A tragedy written within the same period, Richard II, has more powerful topical resonances, suggesting explicit parallels with the Queen and her circle. Its perplexing and troubled history will be explored at some length. Finally, I shall touch on the most extravagant, as well as the most baffling, tribute (apparently) paid by Shakespeare to Elizabeth I: his contribution to Robert Chester’s Loves martyr. Shakespeare’s relationship with Elizabeth I has been much mythologized. In a marvellously fresh and lucid study Helen Hackett has explored the persistence with which many people, in many periods, have wanted to imagine, or even to believe in, a personal relationship between the poet and the Queen.1 There is no contemporary record of a personal, individual relationship between the two, nor of private audiences, such as many writers, artists and scriptwriters have imagined. The forger William Ireland, for instance, ‘responded to the cravings of his father and the general

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public’ by creating such records. ‘Missing’ material that he fabricated in 1795 included an ill-spelt letter from Elizabeth to Shakespeare, endorsed by Shakespeare himself with the instruction that ‘itte maye bee kepte with alle care possible’.2 More recently, in 1998, the film Shakespeare in Love included a surprise appearance by the Queen at the Curtain theatre. She invites Shakespeare to come and meet her privately at Greenwich. More recently still, an episode of Doctor Who in 2007 showed a rather rough-hewn Shakespeare in rehearsal telling an actor ‘You never know, the Queen might turn up’ – and of course she does.3 Most of such fantasies end up by making the relationship between the monarch and the poet seem essentially ridiculous. However, as Professor Hackett shows, they often have light to shed on the prevailing cultural preoccupations of a particular time and society. One dimension that Hackett doesn’t explore is the Shakespeare family’s own perhaps fantastical tradition of service to the Crown. Draft grants of arms to John Shakespeare drawn up in October 1596 allude to John Shakespeare’s ‘parentes & late antecessors’, who ‘were for theyr valieant & faithfull service advaunced & rewarded by the most Prudent Prince King Henry the seventh of famous memorie’. Though this was a formulaic legal fiction, it may be one in which the family wanted to believe. The most striking word is ‘valeant’, which suggests military service to Henry VII, perhaps even at Bosworth Field.4 For William Shakespeare, already, by October 1596, the main author of the ‘Wars of the Roses’ tetralogy and the sole author of Richard II, this may have been an extremely attractive notion, and one which, if publicly proclaimed, would strengthen his credentials as the leading theatrical exponent of British history. Even today, many families cling to picturesque myths and oral traditions concerning their forebears. In a much less sceptical age it would not be surprising if the Shakespeares of Henley Street, Stratford, did so. Their collective faith may have strengthened the confidence of their most talented member, enabling him to view his own court connections as the latest development of an established tradition of service.

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Although it is unlikely that he ever enjoyed a private audience with either monarch, it is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare was well acquainted with Elizabeth’s court, and even more so with that of James, since the King immediately assumed personal patronage of what had been the Lord Chamberlain’s company. In both reigns, this contact came about through holiday season performances of plays at court. Elizabeth was certainly capable of responding warmly and generously to plays that she enjoyed. For instance, when she visited Oxford in the summer of 1566 she saw a two-part play of Palamon and Arcite, derived from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, written by Richard Edwards, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal and performed in the hall of Christ Church. According to the Oxford antiquary Miles Windsor: The Queen laughed full heartily afterward at some of the players . . . and gave unto John Rainolds, a scholar of Corpus Christi College which was a player in the same play, eight old angels in reward . . . and when the play was ended she called for Mr. Edwards, the author, and gave him very great thanks, with promises of reward, for his pains.5 She made detailed comments on the play’s principal characters, and also gave ‘eight old angels’ to the boy who had acted and sung in the role of Emilia. On this occasion both the playwright and two leading performers received personal rewards. When he performed at court in plays that he himself had written Shakespeare should have qualified for especially generous rewards if the Queen was pleased both with a play and with its rendition. As we saw in the last chapter, Henry Chettle claimed, immediately after the Queen’s death, that Elizabeth had ‘graced’ Shakespeare’s ‘desert’, having hearkened to his ‘laies’. The word ‘lay’, associated with long poems, might suggest that she relished Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to Lord Burghley’s ward Southampton. This is possible. But since the word ‘graced’ implies reward, the lines are more likely to allude primarily to performances of Shakespeare’s plays at court, with

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Fig. 7. Queen Elizabeth I among her courtiers.

Shakespeare himself as a leading performer. The Queen could open her royal ears to lines he had written, and hear some of them delivered by the poet himself. There were at least thirty-three performances at court by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men between 1594 and 1603.6 Frustratingly, records from this period don’t name any specific plays. But it seems reasonable to surmise both that at least a quarter – very probably a third – of the plays performed by the Chamberlain’s Men were written by Shakespeare, and that these plays were among the best liked. Elizabeth may have been informed by one of her close cousins the Lords Chamberlain – either Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, or his son and successor George – that the ‘poet’ who wrote some of the plays that she and her court most enjoyed was also one of the company’s leading performers, and was called William Shakespeare. Elizabeth’s awareness of Shakespeare, and her special favour towards him, could have originated much earlier. An elegiac

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ballad recently identified as a tribute to the player William Knell composed by his Queen’s Men colleague Richard Tarlton provides evidence that the Queen sometimes promoted individual players whose work especially pleased her. It has long been recognized that men of lowly origin could receive a place at court as fools, enjoying a specially protected status. The first quotation at the head of this chapter comes from the scene in As You Like It in which the licensed jester Touchstone boasts of the manners he has learned from daily familiarity with the court. The second quotation comes from Tarlton’s ballad, and suggests that royal favour could also sometimes extend to especially talented ‘straight’ actors. Until its fifteenth and final stanza, this ballad is in the voice of ‘Peggie’, Knell’s sixteen-year-old widow Rebecca, who was soon to marry John Heminge. In stanzas 8 and 9 she reports that: Tyme caused my willie to come to the courte And in favour to be with the Queene Wher oft he made her grace for to smile When she full sad was sene . . . A groome of her chamber my willie was made To waight upon her grace And well he behaved him selfe therein When he had obtained the place.7 In a previous stanza an allusion to ‘Willie’ as being pitifully lamented ‘in bower & hall’ suggests the variety of places where actors performed, ranging from inn-yards or private houses to halls in great houses and palaces, as well as purpose-built theatres. William Knell was evidently versatile and quick-witted. In the ballad he is praised for his ability to improvise ‘on themes so hard’ thrown out by members of the audience. He would be better remembered by posterity were it not for his early death in June 1587, as a result of a fight with a fellow player. Given Shakespeare’s talent for acting as well as writing, there is a distinct possibility that he too gave especial pleasure to the Queen while he was a member of her own company, and/or that

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he was recruited to that company from another as a result of having pleased her.8 It was from Leicester’s Men that ‘master actors’ were regularly selected for the Queen’s Men, and given the former company’s Warwickshire connections this seems a plausible sequence of events.9 Evidence of membership of the Queen’s Men is embedded in the phrase ‘such rude groomes’ deployed by Chettle in his attack on Shakespeare in Groatsworth (see Chapter 1). Like the King’s Men in the next reign, full members of the monarch’s own playing company, or that of her Lord Chamberlain, were technically ‘grooms of the chamber’. Chettle, lurking behind the mask of Greene, had suggested that some of these players, ill-educated and low-born, did not merit such status. Even stronger evidence that Shakespeare was at one time a Queen’s Man is embodied in his detailed acquaintance with various plays in that company’s repertory.10 If Chettle knew both that Shakespeare had been a member of the Queen’s Men, and that he was favoured by the Queen herself in 1592 and perhaps earlier, Shakespeare’s failure to mourn her death, discussed in the previous chapter, did indeed lay him open to allegations of ingratitude. As well as playing at court during the Christmas to Shrovetide holiday season, leading companies performed plays in various noblemen’s mansions, both in London and the provinces. For instance, Titus Andronicus was performed by the Chamberlain’s Men at the Old Hall, Exton on 1 January 1596, after three performances at court that Christmas. As Andrew Gurr has shown, they then had to travel back from Rutland in mid-winter with all possible speed in order to be at Whitehall in time to perform yet another play at court on 6 January (Twelfth Night), the festive climax of the Christmas holiday.11 Sometimes, on progress, or in London, the Queen herself attended performances of plays in private houses, which were then technically ‘court’ events. At other times a play and its performance were prepared in the strong hope and expectation that she would be present. An example of the latter scenario was discussed in Chapter 1 (p. 45). Greene and Nashe’s play Summers last will was written for performance at

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Croydon Palace in the hope that Elizabeth would make this her last staging-post at the end of her 1592 progress. Even though she wasn’t, in the event, present at its performance, the whole piece had been designed with her tastes and pleasures prominently in mind.

i. three courtly comedies The normal procedure seems to have been for the Master of the Revels to select plays for court performance which had already been successfully enacted in public theatres. Love’s Labour’s Lost appears to fall into this category. According to the title-page of the earliest surviving edition (1598) this ‘Pleasant Conceited Comedie’ has been ‘Newly corrected and augmented By W. Shakespere’. It now appears in print ‘As it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas’. This would seem to identify Christmas 1597 as the occasion for its performance at court – possibly as much as two years after the likely date of the play’s first composition. The Chamberlain’s Men played at court on 26 December 1597, and again on 1 and 6 January 1598, still technically ‘Christmas’, the third date being Twelfth Night. With its French setting, the play would be especially suitable for performance in the presence of the visiting French ambassador, André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse. However, as Henry Woudhuysen has pointed out, such claims as these were often repeated on title-pages of later editions without emendation. There is reason to suspect that there was an earlier printing of Love’s Labour’s Lost of which no exemplar has survived, and for all we know the claims may have first appeared there.12 As Woudhuysen also notes, most scholars date the play’s composition to 1594–5.13 He shows that the evidence for this dating is quite ‘thin’, but does not dissent from it. Many suggestions have been made about the play’s topical allusions both to affairs in England and to current or recent political events in France, where the play is set. I shall not attempt to untangle these complex political and historical issues. I want, rather, to consider some of the resonances that the play may have had when performed in the presence of Elizabeth.

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As David Wiles observes, Love’s Labour’s Lost ‘enacts a halfserious, half jesting encounter between an inept male-centred court and an accomplished female-centred court’. In this sense, the play clearly compliments the female-centred court known to its early audiences. Wiles also discerns a relationship ‘between the Princess of the play and the Queen of real life’.14 I would like to develop this suggestion further. So far as we know, Shakespeare never wrote a full-length play intended exclusively for court performance. He was prudent enough to maximize the profitability of everything he wrote by ensuring that it could engage the interest of a wide range of auditors. In the case of Love’s Labour’s Lost, popular audiences, as well as courtiers, will have noticed the resemblance of the forceful and dignified Princess of France to their own forceful and self-reliant Queen. The play’s Princess stubbornly insists on meeting the King of Navarre and his lords on her own terms, and refuses to the very last to enter his palace, despite his impassioned pleas.15 This is analogous to Elizabeth’s practice when receiving ambassadors representing foreign powers. She often kept them waiting for an audience, and insisted on their making inconvenient journeys to meet her. For instance, in the last winter of her life she postponed a scheduled audience with the elderly Venetian ambassador Scaramelli by a week at the last minute. This required him to make a trying journey from London to Richmond in severe winter weather. Italians resident in London and more familiar with her ways later assured Scaramelli that she frequently cancelled audiences at short notice ‘for no other reason than haughtiness’.16 The Princess in Shakespeare’s comedy is also, like Elizabeth, expert in flirting enthusiastically with foreign wooers while steadfastly deferring any solid commitment. On the apparent brink of acceptance Elizabeth, like the fictional Princess, was apt to set conditions which ensured that no genuine betrothal would ensue. These strategies were most conspicuously and persistently deployed during the celebrated ‘Alençon courtship’ of the late 1570s and early 1580s. Elizabeth first dallied with the socially gifted emissary Jean Simier, her ‘monkey’, and then with the

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prince himself, François, Duc d’Alençon, her ‘frog’, a rather less charming man. Many even of Elizabeth’s closest advisers were deceived, growing desperately worried – as well as embarrassed – by her apparent infatuation with this small, pock-marked and talentless youth. Memories of these years linger on today in a nursery-rhyme about a foolish frog who would a-wooing go. By the time of Alençon’s second visit to England, in 1582, it was apparent to informed observers that the Queen’s continued flirtation was intended chiefly as leverage to ensure French military support for the rebellion against Spanish rule in certain provinces in the Netherlands. Despite her parting injunction to him to ‘address his letters to his wife the Queen of England’,17 it soon became evident that she had no intention of marrying Alençon, or, indeed, anyone. However, until Alençon’s death on 31 May 1589 neither Elizabeth’s courtiers nor her humbler subjects could rest entirely easy on that score. Memories of the episode were still fairly fresh at the time of the earliest performances of Love’s Labour’s Lost. By giving the Princess no personal name, and presenting her, at the end of the play, as receiving news of the death of the King of France, her father, Shakespeare also invited parallels with a much earlier phase of Elizabeth’s life. It is not definitely stated that the Princess of the play is her father’s heir, but nor is it suggested that she has any siblings. She clearly functions as her father’s deputy in the play’s opening. It is reasonable to surmise that when she returns to France at the end of the play she will succeed to her father’s throne. The part of this Princess, who so much loves hunting, dancing, and playing merciless tricks on men, could easily be performed in such a way as to appear reminiscent of young Elizabeth during the early years of her reign, beset by many wooers, both English and foreign, but accepting none – a phase on which she appears to comment in a poem attributed to her in the 1590s: When I was fair and young, then favor graced me, Of many was I sought their mistress for to be,

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But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore: Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.18 These topical parallels were suggested visually in an elegant production of Love’s Labour’s Lost directed by Greg Doran for the RSC in 2008.19 Here the Princess’s appearance was modelled on the woodcuts of Elizabeth hunting that accompany Gascoigne’s Arte of Venerie (1575). With such parallels to the fore, the play’s conclusion left no room for hope that the King of Navarre and his three companions will succeed in winning their ladies in twelve months’ time, since, as we all know, Elizabeth never did marry. By the mid-1590s it had become clear that she never would. Yet then as now, different performances, in different contexts, could permit audience members to hope more comfortingly that the marriages so much desired by the King and his three companions are only deferred, and may eventually be consummated. Love’s Labour’s Lost is a famously difficult and allusive text. It can be enjoyable in performance precisely because we are so often presented with strange words and phrases – puns that we can only half understand, and topical allusions that we can’t fully grasp. We have the feeling that all sorts of fascinating but semi-secret things are going on. It is not surprising that various good scholars used to believe that the play alludes to a secret society or occult group known as ‘The School of Night’, even though few now support the notion.20 The play often teases us with tantalizing ‘in’-references and ‘in’-jokes. It also incorporates what could be a parody-portrait of Shakespeare himself as a Johannes factotum and courtly fixer. Boyet, the Princess of France’s chief lord, is characterized by his smooth rhetoric and courtly manners. As a go-between, match-maker and social commentator his role is rather like that of a playwright. In the play’s final scene the evereloquent Berowne comments at length on Boyet as a skilled rhetorician and devoted courtier: Why, this is he That kissed his hand away in courtesy. This is the ape of form, Monsieur the Nice,

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That when he plays at tables chides the dice In honourable terms. Nay, he can sing A mean most meanly; and in ushering Mend him who can. The ladies call him sweet. The stairs, as he treads on them, kiss his feet. This is the flower that smiles on everyone, To show his teeth as white as whale’s bone; And consciences that will not die in debt Pay him the due of ‘honey-tongued Boyet’. (LLL 5.2.323–34) This is a witty portrait of a smooth, dedicated court servant who will go to any lengths to please. As an auxiliary to others, never an independent player, he is consummately successful. The phrase that seems to hint at a personal allusion is ‘honey-tongued’ in the last line, anticipating both Meres’s ‘mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare’ and Weever’s ‘Honie-tong’d Shakespeare’ (see above, pp. 157–62). Perhaps Meres and Weever both recognized Shakespeare’s description of Boyet, articulated by the truth-telling Berowne, as somehow applicable to the poet himself. However, like so much else in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the passage doesn’t seem possible to pin down as a definite personal allusion. If Shakespeare did want to replace Chettle’s hostile account of himself as a ‘rude groom’ and ‘upstart Crow’ with a playful counter-image of himself as an unctuous but indispensable courtly factotum, this speech might do it. But it may be no such thing. The connections of A Midsummer Night’s Dream both to Elizabeth I and to some of her courtiers seem more substantial. I have written elsewhere about a letter from Sir George Carey at court, then resident at St Albans because of plague in London and Westminster, written to his wife Elizabeth, on the Isle of Wight, on 13 November 1593. In a postscript he alludes to ‘alfonseo Fr. games in court’, such as ‘dremes and interpretations of them’, ‘going to the wood with letters’, ‘awakings at theyr mistres name, and shewinge the causes whi, or sleepinge and likewise shewinge cause wherfor’.21 This postscript seems to have

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been intended for the attention and enjoyment of the Careys’ only surviving child, their seventeen-year-old daughter ‘Bess’. These ‘games’ appear to have been presided over by Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger – ‘alfonseo Fr’. In 1592 the Queen awarded Ferrabosco an annuity as ‘musitian for the violles’. He may have given instrumental tuition to young courtiers of both sexes, as he was to do to Prince Henry in 1606.22 Ferrabosco’s ‘games in court’ do not provide a full template for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet an association of young, unmarried courtiers with ‘dremes’, with ‘going to the wood’, and with further sports involving amorous letters and speeches, seems to sketch out a cultural landscape that would make this play especially suitable for performance as part of the celebrations of Elizabeth Carey’s marriage to Sir Thomas Berkeley in the Carey mansion at the Blackfriars on 19 February 1595, five days after St Valentine’s Day, a feast to which Theseus alludes in Act 4, scene 1: ‘Saint Valentine is past.’23 A few weeks before her father’s letter Bess Carey’s particular interest in dreams had been publicly flagged up in Nashe’s dedication to her of The Terrors of the Night in the summer of 1593.24 Shakespeare’s play seems also to accommodate the known interests of the bridegroom, Sir Thomas Berkeley. Most Elizabethan aristocrats were fond of hunting. But as Wiles points out, ‘Henry Berkeley and his son Thomas, who lacked all military, political and intellectual interests, were obsessed by hunting to a quite unusual extent.’25 Thomas Berkeley’s mother, Katherine née Howard, was also well known to be an outstandingly vigorous sportswoman and archer with the longbow, not normally a feminine weapon in this period. She was in this sense Amazon-like – and Hippolyta is Queen of the Amazons. Eventually, as Wiles, says, ‘The expense of hunting was a major factor in the disintegration of the marriage of Thomas and Elizabeth’. The family’s first choice of a husband for Bess Carey had been William Herbert, later to be 3rd Earl of Pembroke and a major literary patron, with wide cultural and political interests. Thomas Berkeley, in contrast, cared for very little except his horses and hounds and hunting on the Berkeley estates in

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Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. E.A.J. Honigmann has observed that Theseus’s eulogy of his own pack of hounds ‘has an air of being there for its own sake’.26 This short scene in which both Hippolyta and Theseus celebrate the ‘musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction’ (MND 4.1.102–25) may have been especially included to gratify the Berkeley family. In performance, resonant sound-effects or music perhaps evoked the exciting noise of a hunt with a splendid ‘cry’ of hounds. The Carey–Berkeley wedding was an event to which it would be natural to hope that the Queen would give her personal blessing. Sir George Carey was her cousin (nephew?), and greatly loved by her; his wife, Elizabeth née Spencer, was one of her Gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, and also a favourite; and their only child, ‘Bess’, was a favourite god-daughter. And as David Wiles has shown, it was fairly common for royal and noble marriage celebrations to include the performance of a play.27 Perhaps it was in hopeful anticipation of the Queen’s presence at some of the Carey–Berkeley revelries that Shakespeare put certain loyal speeches into the commanding voice of Oberon in 2.1. This suggestion has been dismissed because the Queen was not present at the legal ceremony in the Careys’ house in the Blackfriars on 19 February. But the Queen was not in the habit of attending such ceremonies. There may all along have been a plan for the Chamberlain’s Men to perform a comedy at court in celebration of a marriage solemnized a few days earlier. Such a highprofile union between two noble families, the outcome of so much planning, would hardly be a one-day event. The Chamberlain, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, was both the Queen’s much-loved first cousin – possibly her half-brother – and the grandfather of the bride. He was in an excellent position to mastermind the nuptial revelries and to arrange for some of them to take place in the presence of the Queen. A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens with a marriage that has been bindingly agreed – that of Theseus and Hippolyta. The festive nuptial revels that will include the play of Pyramus and Thisbe are supposedly to take place four days later, though the play’s

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action appears to take only two days and one night. Either interval roughly approximates to the time-gap between the legal solemnization of the Carey–Berkeley marriage, on 19 February, and the next occasion when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at court, in Richmond Palace on 22 February. This was ‘Shrove Sunday’, a regular occasion for major revelry at court before the austerities of Lent. Something exceptional about this particular Shrove Sunday is suggested by the fact that both the Chamberlain’s and the Lord Admiral’s Men performed plays at court that day – the first of only three occasions when they did so.28 The Lord Admiral’s wife, Catherine née Carey, was Sir George Carey’s elder sister, and thus an aunt of the bride. For both companies, therefore, revelries that day would have strong family resonances. As a boy of eleven Shakespeare himself probably witnessed some of the spectacular entertainments that took place outside the walls of Kenilworth Castle in the summer of 1575, when Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, entertained Elizabeth. One of these, the late-afternoon water pageant, appears to be alluded to by Oberon when he reminds Puck of the time when both of them ‘once’ – that is, quite a long time ago – heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song And certain stars shot madly from their spheres To hear the sea-maid’s music. (MND 2.1.150–54)29 Oberon’s back-story for the magic love-juice which he commands Puck to procure is widely agreed to allude to Elizabeth as ‘a fair vestal’, wooed unsuccessfully by Leicester at Kenilworth in 1575: That very time I saw (but thou couldst not), Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid, all arm’d: a certain aim he took At a fair vestal, throned by the west,

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And loos’d his love-shaft smartly from his bow As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon; And the imperial votress passed on In maiden meditation, fancy-free. Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound: And maidens call it ‘love-in-idleness’. (MND 2.1.155–68)30 The juice of this flower – a wild pansy – is to have a potent effect on Titania, who is a kind of antitype to the Virgin Queen Elizabeth – a Fairy Queen who, though married, proves to be foolishly susceptible to intense and inappropriate sexual passion. Scholars have been reluctant either to acknowledge that Oberon’s speech is a tribute to the Virgin Queen, or to confront the question of whether at some point she received it in person, or was at least expected to do so. Stanley Wells, for instance, has suggested that the word ‘imperial’ in Oberon’s speech here simply means ‘imperious’ – i.e. bossy – with no suggestion of royal status. In his Oxford edition of the play Peter Holland endorses Wells’s suggestion, and does not gloss ‘votress’.31 Yet the word ‘votress’ (or ‘votaress’) is crucial in making it clear – should the audience be in any doubt – that the ‘fair vestal’ invoked by Oberon was not simply a virginal girl who might subsequently marry, but a woman who, nun-like, has devoted herself to a whole life-time of virginity. This could only mean Elizabeth I. Holland dismisses what he calls the ‘wedding occasion theory’, and suggests that those who favour it do so only because they ‘wish to rescue the play from the clutches of the popular theatre audience’.32 However, as I’ve already argued with reference to Love’s Labour’s Lost, a play could perfectly well be fashioned both for a special occasion and for repeated public performance. It wasn’t a case of ‘either/or’. I believe that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was

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so fashioned. Holland never mentions that the bride’s grandfather was the company’s patron, Lord Hunsdon, for whom, if anyone, the company was most likely to prepare an ‘occasional’ play. Holland was unaware of the bride’s father’s jottings about ‘games at court’ – they had not yet been made public – and does not mention Nashe’s dedication of The Terrors of the Night to ‘Bess’ Carey. Although Elizabeth did not witness the legal ceremony of her god-daughter’s marriage – which would in any case have been a very unusual thing for her to do – it is highly likely that she saw the play when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men next performed at court, at Richmond Palace, on 22 February 1596.33 It is probable that there was no performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Careys’ London house, a scenario first proposed by E.K. Chambers and later endorsed by Harold Brooks, David Wiles and others. However, I suggest, the play was performed at court. After the solemnization of the marriage in London on the 19th the bridal pair, their parents, grandparents, family and friends all made their way by barge to Richmond Palace for extended nuptial revels during the Shrovetide holiday. As Lord Chamberlain, the bride’s grandfather was responsible for general oversight of court entertainments, and should not stay away from court for more than a couple of days. All along, the Carey–Berkeley union may have been planned, like that of Hippolyta and Theseus, as culminating in revelries at court. The comedy may have been tested out on the ‘popular theatre audience’ some weeks or months earlier. Alternatively it may have entered the company’s public repertoire in the following spring as a play already powerfully endorsed by courtly spectators. One-off deployment of the Dream as an ‘occasional’ play is not incompatible with its status as a comedy that would attract large crowds to the playhouse, as it has continued to do to the present day. Indeed, in the later 1590s a ‘royal’ association would make it especially attractive to rank-and-file theatregoers. Jonson’s comment on the Sweet Swan of Avon’s ‘flights’ ‘upon the bankes of Thames / That so did take Eliza’ would square particularly well with performances of plays that especially

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captivated – that is, ‘took’ – the Queen having been staged at Richmond, her favourite riverside palace. Most royal palaces were near rivers, but Richmond was unusual in having major rooms in close proximity to the waterside, rather than merely kitchens and offices, and its tower-like royal quarters (‘donjon’) also offered a good view of the river.34 Jonson’s poem will be discussed fully in the final chapter. The Merry Wives of Windsor, the third ‘courtly comedy’ to be discussed here, has attracted the largest body of apocryphal stories associating the play with the Queen.35 There is abundant evidence that the character of Falstaff was an instant hit both with readers and with playgoers. He became a household name immediately after performances of 1 Henry IV in which the character was so named. Overall, there are so many references to him that John Munro in his Allusion-Book explained that ‘For the purposes of the Index Falstaff is treated as a work’ – the only character to be so treated. Some of these allusions have courtly associations. For instance, in a merry postscript to an otherwise sombre letter to her husband, Shakespeare’s early patron the Earl of Southampton, the Countess used ‘Sir John Falstaff ’ as a nickname for a mutual acquaintance – presumably fat – who has apparently fathered a child on a lower-rank woman analogous to Mistress Quickly (cf. 1H4 2.4.387): Al the nues I can send you that I thinke wil make you mery is that I reade in a letter from London that Sir John Falstaf is by his Mistress Dame Pintpot made father of a godly milers thum, a boye thats all heade and veri litel body; but this is secrit.36 The letter seems to belong to 1599, when Southampton was on campaign in Ireland. It is believed to allude to Henry Brooke, 11th Lord Cobham, Essex’s fiercest enemy. Essex himself made a joking allusion to Sir John Falstaff in a letter to Robert Cecil a couple of years earlier.37 As Essex’s ‘General of the Horse’ – a title not sanctioned by the Queen – he was over there for the whole summer. His wife, meanwhile, was staying at Chartley, in

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Staffordshire, with Essex’s sister, Penelope Rich, née Devereux. In the body of the letter the Countess asks her husband for permission to accompany Penelope Rich to London. Her use of an allusion to Shakespeare’s most celebrated character in an attempt to make her husband ‘mery’ during the difficult and dangerous Irish campaign strongly suggests that when in London Southampton especially enjoyed Shakespeare’s Falstaff plays. The larger-than-life character’s well-documented popularity makes it credible that the Queen herself did ask Shakespeare to compose a play showing Sir John Falstaff in love, as Sir John Dennis claimed in 1702.38 The unique genre and setting of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a farcical comedy with an English bourgeois setting, and with a trio of mature women – Mistresses Quickly, Ford and Page – as its strongest moving forces, suggests something unusual about its genesis. If a royal command is the explanation, I wish Elizabeth had more often made her theatrical desires known, since Shakespeare rose so brilliantly to this rare challenge. There is a symbolic ‘royal’ dimension that links The Merry Wives with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The earlier play’s characters include a ‘Queen of Fairies’ who could not possibly be confused with the chaste living monarch eulogized by Edmund Spenser in his allegorical romance, still less with Elizabeth I. As already mentioned, Titania is married, jealous and susceptible to the potent love-juice begotten by Cupid’s shaft that had left the ‘imperial votress’ for ever ‘fancy-free’. The Merry Wives likewise incorporates an appearance by a Fairy Queen who could not be confused either with the living Queen Elizabeth or with Edmund Spenser’s remote and allegorical Gloriana, though she may glance at both. Giorgio Melchiori has argued convincingly that the nocturnal revels at Herne’s Oak in Act 5 are based on a small masque or court entertainment which formed part of Garter celebrations in April and May 1597, when the Lord Chamberlain George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, became a Knight of the Garter. For cogent reasons too complex to rehearse here, Melchiori suggests that the play as a whole was composed in the later part of 1599, and that Shakespeare worked on it at the very same time

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when he was writing 2 Henry IV, which concludes with Falstaff ’s downfall.39 A major feature of the (earlier written) ‘Garter’ scenes is the entrance of Mistress Quickly, described in a stage direction in the First Quarto as ‘like the Queene of Fayries’. But like Titania, the disguised Nell Quickly is a manifestly downmarket Fairy Queen, who alludes to Elizabeth I, but does not threaten or mock her. As we know from scenes earlier in the play, the holiday ‘queen’ is only a senior household servant, whose job as ‘housekeeper’ is to make sure that her retinue of fairies and elves prepare and adorn Windsor Castle splendidly for the coming Garter Feast. Unlike the jealous and amorous Titania, however, this ‘Queene of Fayries’ rebukes the pleasures of the flesh. She orders her fairy troop to torment Falstaff with sharp pinches as a punishment for his unlawful desires, as spelt out in their song: Lust is but a bloody fire, Kindled with unchaste desire, Fed in heart, whose flames aspire, As thoughts do blow them, higher and higher. (MW 5.5.95–8) By presenting this ‘Queene of Fayries’ as a staunch enemy to lust Shakespeare honoured Elizabeth’s own personal chastity at the very same time as meeting her demand for a piece showing Falstaff ‘in love’. Again according to the First Quarto (1602), the play had been ‘divers times Acted by the right Honorable my Lord Chamberlaines servants. Both before her Majestie, and elsewhere’. This last is a rather unusual claim, which could include a suggestion that the Queen herself liked the play so much that she viewed it more than once – ‘divers times’. She may either have witnessed repeat performances of the full play, or a performance of the ‘Garter’ masque in 1597 and then one of the play as a whole in 1599 or later. Certainly The Merry Wives must have been performed before her on at least one occasion. It is unlikely that Q1’s publisher, Arthur Johnson, would have dared to make such an assertion while both the Queen and her Lord Chamberlain were alive unless he was confident that it was correct.

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Elizabeth is known to have objected to blatant representations of herself on the stage. An early example of this occurred at Kenilworth in 1575 when she repeatedly refused to see Gascoigne’s play Zabeta. The title alone – a version of her own name – was a clear indication of its subject matter, and she was probably also shown an ‘argument’ or plot summary that made it apparent that the play strongly praised marriage as superior to virginity. A quarter of a century later Jonson got into trouble for including a boy actor’s impersonation of Elizabeth as a morally redemptive dea ex machina at the end of Every Man Out of his Humour in a performance of the play at court late in 1599. Characteristically, he went to considerable lengths to justify his use of the device. Nevertheless, he cancelled the Queen’s appearance and revised the play’s conclusions to eliminate it from the second printed text.40 But Elizabeth probably understood that Mistress Quickly’s impersonation of a ‘Fairy Queen’ could not possibly be seen as a literal mirroring of herself, and was therefore not offensive. Shakespeare had achieved a witty balancing act. The punishment of Falstaff by the downmarket ‘Fairy Queen’ flattered Elizabeth by associating her with staunch chastity, yet the disguised Mistress Quickly could not possibly be seen as a literal simulacrum of her. And despite this morally corrective denouement, Shakespeare made sure that the Queen’s personal fondness for the unruly knight was eventually endorsed. In the comedy’s closing moments Falstaff ’s debt to Master Ford is forgiven, and everyone, including Falstaff, prepares ‘to feast’. An audience, especially a court audience, could cheerfully do the same.

ii. a true tragedy Shakespeare’s mastery of balancing acts when handling material that could potentially be perceived as offensive by the monarch or her advisers was never more in evidence than in The Tragedy of Richard II. Extraordinarily, this play, which was eventually to bring both Shakespeare and his company to the brink of disaster, appears to have been written close in time to A Midsummer Night’s

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Dream, with its passage of unmistakable tribute to the Virgin Queen. It must have been evident from the outset that the material would need delicate handling. Identifications of Elizabeth with Richard II had been current for some years. Both monarchs were childless, with no designated successor; both laid heavy taxes on the nobility; both faced rebellion and disaffection in Ireland; and Richard’s troubles had approached their disastrous end exactly two hundred years earlier, in the late 1390s. Both monarchs were also seen as surrounding themselves with flatterers rather than wise counsellors. The phrase ‘Richard II’s men’, meaning untrustworthy sycophants, was used by at least two of Elizabeth’s advisers long before Shakespeare wrote his play: by Sir Francis Knollys in 1578, and by her cousin and favourite the 1st Lord Hunsdon some time in the 1580s. The latter proudly remarked, with reference to the Queen’s refusal to elevate him above the rank of Baron, that ‘I was never one of Richard II’s men’.41 Such parallels made the theme of the late years of the reign of Richard II at once fascinating and risky. As Charles Forker has shown, the play was composed with exceptional care, to judge by its consistency and coherence.42 It may have taken months rather than weeks to complete, given also Shakespeare’s frequent and thoughtful use of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1589), with some reference also to Samuel Daniel’s newly published The First Fowre Bokes of the civile wars (1595). The play is written entirely in verse, nearly a quarter of which is rhymed. As Forker, again, remarks, rhyme is here ‘often employed to signal the end or approaching end of a scene or important speech, to lend point to an apothegm, or simply to delight hearers with an ornamental flourish of patterned musicality’.43 There is no clown, and there are no songs. The music that is heard when Richard soliloquizes in 5.5 is not a festive divertissement but a device to add a further dimension to the King’s prolonged meditations in prison at Pomfret. Technically, as a fully finished and carefully constructed verse artefact, Richard II is the play most analogous to Shakespeare’s two narrative poems. It also shares with The Rape

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of Lucrece a drift towards extended speeches of complaint. Richard soliloquizing in prison has much in common with Lucrece soliloquizing during the nocturnal hours following her rape. If the parallel was observed by early audiences, it would help to support a reading of the play as showing this monarch as essentially virtuous, and greatly wronged. Shakespeare’s company and their patron were no doubt well aware that this ambitious work was in progress. By the winter of 1595 it appears to have been complete. Early performances may have taken place in the autumn of 1595 in James Burbage’s ‘Theatre’ in Shoreditch.44 The starring role of the King was presumably taken by Richard Burbage. This casting alone – quite apart from Shakespeare’s sympathetic treatment, to be discussed later – ensured that the King was seen by theatre audiences as a charismatic and fascinating figure, whatever his errors of judgement. T.W. Baldwin’s suggestion that Augustine Phillips played Bolingbroke is plausible, especially given the real-life part that Phillips was to perform as the company’s spokesman and gobetween for the players with the court in February 1601. If it was he who played the usurper Henry IV, Phillips’s fictional status at the play’s conclusion was both most eminent and most in need of justification. In a brilliant short article on doubling Alan Armstrong has argued that the actor who played Gaunt doubled as the dignified, not rustic, Gardener, in 3.4.45 I would like to make a further suggestion that this actor was Shakespeare, with his aptitude both for ‘old man’ roles and for reflective commentary. Perhaps he also took the cameo role of the poor ‘Groom of the Stable’ who visits the King in prison in 5.5.67–97. This man, who declares his continued loyalty to Richard at great risk to himself, was Shakespeare’s invention. He could be taken as a mouthpiece for the loyalty of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, royal ‘grooms’ to a later monarch. The earliest allusion to the play as complete relates, I believe, to the issue of its possible performance at court during the 1595–6 Christmas holiday season. The relevant document is a letter written by Sir Edward Hoby to Robert Cecil on 7 December 1595:

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Sir, findinge that yow wer not convenientlie to be at London to morrowe night I am bold to send to knowe whether Tewsdaie46 may be anie more in your grace to visit poore Channonrowe where as late as yt shal please you a gate for your supper shal be open: & King Richard present him selfe to your vewe. Pardon my boldness that ever love to be honored with your presence nether do I importune more then your occasions may willingly assent unto, in the meanetime & ever restinge At your command Edw. Hoby. [Endorsed by Hoby] 7 Dec. 1595 [Endorsed by Cecil] readile.47 As David Bergeron, among many others, has observed, it is not clear either that the ‘King Richard’ alluded to here is Richard II, rather than, say, Richard Coeur de Lion or Richard III, or that what Hoby was offering to Robert Cecil was a sight of a play rather than (for instance) a painting.48 However, the verb to ‘present’ had strong associations with stage performance, as we can see from key examples taken from Shakespeare by the OED: ‘Sir, you shall present before her the Nine Worthies’; ‘He presents Hector of Troy’ (LLL 5.1.109–10; 5.2.530–31); ‘Tonight at Herne’s oak . . . Must my sweet Nan present the Fairy Queen’ (MW 4.6.19–20); and ‘This wide and universal theatre / Presents more woeful pageants . . . ’ (AYL 2.7.138–9). For reasons to be explained, I believe that Hoby’s letter does relate to a special performance of Shakespeare’s latest history play, which was to appear in print in 1597 as The Tragedie of King Richard the second. A point to bear in mind is that Sir Edward Hoby was Robert Cecil’s first cousin. Their mothers were two of those celebrated ‘Cooke sisters’, well-educated and highly intelligent daughters of Sir Antony Cooke of Gidea Hall, Essex. As shown in many other letters from Hoby to Cecil, the men were on extremely affable and intimate terms. The compulsively quarrelsome Hoby often turned to Cecil for support when he was locked in disputes with others. During the period of the letter quoted, for instance, Hoby

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was quarrelling furiously with Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s, about his own alleged failure to pay the full agreed rent on some property at Gillingham, in Kent, and Cecil seems to have supported him. Through his marriage to Margaret, née Carey, Hoby was also son-in-law to the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, and brother-in-law to the Lord Admiral’s wife, Catherine née Carey. He was knighted on the occasion of this marriage in 1582.49 The Queen presumably felt that a son-in-law of her cousin Lord Hunsdon had to be a nobleman. Hoby was thus closely linked both to the son and deputy of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the Queen’s closest and most trusted adviser from the very earliest days of her reign, and to the patrons of the two leading playing companies, the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral. He was thus a natural intermediary between the players and the court. There is reason to believe that Hoby took a lively interest in theatrical matters. He had personal connections with the poet and playwright Thomas Lodge, for Lodge had been Hoby’s scholar at Trinity College, Oxford, in the mid-1570s. Hoby’s published works also reflect theatrical preoccupations. For instance, in his lively anti-Jesuit satire A Counter-Snarle for Ishmael Rabshacheh (1613) Hoby ridicules his opponent by referring to his Jesuit gown as ‘the long-sided skirtes of his fooles coat’; he claims that ‘hee hath met with Fortunatus his hat’, alluding to Dekker’s play, revised for court performance in 1599; and remarks that ‘Miles gloriosus, [has] beene long since a laughing stocke, to the whole Theatre’.50 There is a later letter that shows Hoby following the fortunes of another play with risky subject matter. On 7 March 1606 he wrote to Sir Thomas Edmondes about John Day’s Isle of Gulls, performed at the Blackfriars by the Children of the Queen’s Revels: At this time was much speech of a play in the Blackfriars where, in the ‘Isle of Gulls’, from the highest to the lowest, all men’s parts were acted of two divers nations: as I understand sundry were committed to Bridewell.51

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In short, although Hoby held no formal office that required him to keep abreast of the latest plays on behalf of the Queen, the probability that he was doing so on this occasion – and, even more importantly, enabling Robert Cecil to do so – is strong. A further point to bear in mind when interpreting the ‘King Richard’ letter is that Robert Cecil was excessively busy during the mid-1590s. Day by day, with little or no respite, he was deputizing for his frail and elderly father as Secretary of State, under great personal pressure and with apparently limitless dedication. Pauline Croft describes the period thus: Cecil was overwhelmed with work. Burghley was frequently indisposed, whereupon he would press his son relentlessly with orders for the prompt execution of secretarial business, insisting on replies that same day. In February 1594 Cecil was described as coming and going constantly to the court ‘with his hands full of papers and head full of matter’, so preoccupied that he ‘passeth through the presence [chamber] like a blind man not looking upon any’.52 Nearly two years later, Lord Burghley was even more frail and no less demanding, so that his son and deputy Robert Cecil was even more overwhelmed both with business and parental demands. He did not officially succeed his father as Secretary of State until July 1596, despite having performed the duties of this senior post, with none of its rewards, for some years. It is noticeable that Hoby keeps his letters to Cecil quite brief, and that his tone is consciously bantering and playful. In an unusually long later letter to Cecil, written when he was about to depart with Essex for the raid on Cadiz, Hoby promises, in a postscript, ‘to come home again and play the wag once again’.53 He was clearly aware that his cousin needed to be amused now and then. Himself a gentleman of considerable wealth and relative leisure, apart from the litigation and quarrelling that were his favourite occupation, Hoby was no doubt fully aware of his young but already frail cousin’s excessive workload. That makes the pressing tone of the letter quoted above

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especially striking. In effect, he is saying ‘I gather you can’t do Monday, but what about Tuesday?’. Not coming at all seems not to be an option. More striking still is Cecil’s own endorsement ‘readile’ (= readily) which indicates that Hoby’s invitation to supper and a sight of ‘King Richard’ on 9 December was promptly accepted. I suspect that the evening combined business with pleasure. This is suggested by Hoby’s closing phrase: ‘nether do I importune more then your occasions may willingly assent unto’. Hoby knows that Cecil has many ‘occasions’, or pressing items of business, yet this one still has some priority.54 We should also take note of the letter’s date: 7 December. It was the penitential season of Advent, neither a natural nor a correct time for feasting and playgoing. However, by Tuesday, 9 December, Christmas, with its attendant festivities at court (Richmond Palace), was only a fortnight off. That Christmas the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at court on 26, 27 and 28 December, and yet again on Twelfth Night, 6 January 1596. It was to be their busiest court season to date, especially if we factor in their performance on Shrove Sunday, which, as discussed in the preceding section, may have been a celebratory one of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With his close family relationship to the Lord Chamberlain, Edward Hoby was well placed to hear about the latest additions to the company’s repertoire, while Cecil, deputizing for the Queen’s closest councillor, was uniquely qualified to form a view about whether a play with risky subject matter might nevertheless be performable at court. Cecil was already overwhelmed with business, but the question of how best to arrange the Queen’s holiday revels was both important and urgent. Coming to see a new or newly acquired painting of King Richard – any King Richard – would hardly provide a sufficient pretext for Hoby to urge such a busy man to accept a late-night supper invitation. In any case, a picture could wait – or else could be carried over to Cecil House in the Strand to be examined there, if, for instance, it had been procured by Hoby either for Cecil’s or Burghley’s collection. But assessing a historical play that might – or might not – be performed in the presence of the Queen during the forthcoming

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holiday season was a serious matter. We should bear in mind the regular practice of having plays previewed by the civic authorities, whether in the City of London or provincial towns, this preliminary performance allowing local worthies to give a play their approval – or not.55 What took place at Canon Row on 9 December 1595 was, I suggest, a grander equivalent of this practice. Canon Row was on the Thames side of a gated street. Its houses had once been the property of the Dean and Chapter of St Stephen’s Chapel, but later, according to Stow, belonged to ‘divers Noblemen and Gentlemen’. Sir Edward Hoby is mentioned by Stow as the owner of such a house, followed by John Thynne; the Earl of Hertford; and finally William Stanley, Earl of Derby, whose house was in the process of being rebuilt.56 We should not be misled (as some modern scholars have been) by Hoby’s habitual and somewhat ironical use of the epithet ‘poor’. These were substantial city mansions, with halls of sufficient size for the performance of plays. Also, Canon Row was a prime location, slightly to the west of Whitehall Palace, and extremely convenient for Robert Cecil at such time as he was able to break off his day’s (other) business. Less than two years after the ‘King Richard’ letter Hoby sent Robert Cecil a tender letter of condolence on the death of his wife, and finally offered him: the use of my poor house in Channon Row, if for the nearness thereof to Court it might anyways be agreeable unto your honour to remove yourself thither from the place I know you can take no great delight in . . . if you will honour me in this, you shall find the house reasonably furnished to order the whole to your best liking.57 Robert Cecil’s earliest years had been spent in Canon Row, and that location, free from painful recollections of his much-loved wife, might possibly have been consoling for him.58 This time, however, there is no endorsement indicating whether or not Cecil accepted Hoby’s invitation. But we can assume, in the light of Cecil’s own word ‘readile’ inscribed on Hoby’s invitation to him to view King Richard, that

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a semi-private performance of Shakespeare’s play did take place in Cecil’s presence on the evening of 9 December. Hoby was noted for his lavish entertainment.59 He may have assembled a party of family and friends, and Cecil was probably accompanied by some other high-ranking court servants such as the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney. What is impossible to determine is how the play was received that evening, and whether the outcome was that it was, or was not, subsequently included among the four plays performed by the Chamberlain’s Men at court that Christmas. A possible scenario is that Cecil or his father decided that it could be performed at court on condition that the segment now known as the ‘deposition scene’ (4.1.155–318) was omitted. This episode, in which Richard reluctantly hands over his crown to Bolingbroke, did not appear in any of the three Elizabethan printings, one in 1597, two in 1598. It first reached print in the quarto published in 1608, comfortably after Elizabeth’s death. A slightly better version, probably deriving from the company’s promptbook, to which Heminge had access, appeared in the 1623 Folio text of Richard II. Whether the outcome of the special performance of the play on 9 December was that a censored version was performed at court, or that it was not performed there at all, I think we can reckon the event at Hoby’s house as the first of what were to be numerous ‘special’ performances, in diverse locations, in the course of the next five years. Like many works that have a keen edge of danger, Richard II acquired cult status, and all the more so as it was repeatedly overtaken by events that made its topicality appear even more striking. There is a star witness to the frequency of performances of Richard II in diverse locations during the later 1590s. In her celebrated audience with the antiquary William Lambarde at Greenwich Palace on 4 August 1601, six months after the rebellion and execution of the Earl of Essex, the Queen remarked that ‘this tragedie was played, 40tie times in open streets and houses’.60 Recent scholars have gone to extraordinary lengths to argue that this does not allude to performances of Shakespeare’s play, and/ or that Elizabeth was wildly exaggerating. Some commentators

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have been over-literal in their response to her use of the figure ‘40tie’, which is not an exact computation, but a traditional, biblically endorsed term for ‘a large number’. On more major points: in a substantial article in 2008 Paul Hammer raised doubts both about the authenticity of the received record of the audience and about whether the phrase ‘this tragedie’ alludes to a theatrical performance rather than to public appearances in the city streets by Essex or his supporters. In the same year Jonathan Bate made an elaborate claim that the account of Lambarde’s audience was a late seventeenth-century fabrication.61 Yet the textual tradition for the audience is both strong and consistent, and Jason ScottWarren has recently discovered that it originates with Lambarde’s early seventeenth-century descendants.62 Lambarde, a punctilious record-keeper, is likely to have written or dictated the account as soon as he returned back from Greenwich Palace to his own fine manor house at Westcombe, on the edge of Greenwich Park – a journey of less than three miles.63 The private audience with the Queen was the highlight of his career, and naturally required to be documented for the benefit of his heirs. He had been unwell for five years, and was to die two weeks after the audience. But this is not a reason to doubt the authenticity of the audience text – his illness was physical, not mental. Elizabeth’s high esteem for Lambarde, a diligent antiquary, reflects her own regard for historical accuracy. Neither she nor Lambarde was given to wild or fanciful statements about the past, recent or distant. Even if she did not see the then-new play performed at Richmond Palace during the Christmas holidays of 1595–6 – though my own suspicion is that she did – she was likely to be aware of any notable activities of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, especially when these involved Essex and his cronies in the two years following his final disgrace. George Carey, 2nd Lord Hunsdon, who on 14 April 1597 became both a Privy Councillor and Lord Chamberlain, was if possible even dearer to Elizabeth than his late father had been. When he was seriously ill in the summer of 1602 she wrote to him in startlingly intimate terms, promising him, for instance, that

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In what place soever you be, you shall finde us a Mother and a wife to minister unto you all the best effectes of that tender and kinde affection, which wee maie possibly extende to one whom for many respectes wee hold soe neere and deere unto us.64 Although the patron of a playing company was not normally involved in its day-to-day activities, he or she was likely to be made aware of anything they were doing that was remarkable or unusual, especially if it might get them into trouble. Given his physical proximity to Elizabeth from 1597 onwards, as her Lord Chamberlain, with oversight over her household, the younger Lord Hunsdon had plenty of opportunities to keep her fully informed about such matters, even outside the season of the company’s performances at court. Elizabeth herself was familiar with the relevant terminology. Bate is scornful of Elizabeth’s phrase ‘in open streets and houses’, yet such terms were regularly used in what E.K. Chambers called ‘Documents of Control’ during the earlier years of her life and reign. Many of the less dramafriendly Lord Mayors of London forbade performances in such locations – houses of ordinary citizens, inn-yards, and other easily accessible locations – while others, rather surprisingly, permitted them.65 In Bacon’s official published account of Essex’s Practises and Treasons (1601) his last two years were described as a tragedy in two acts. The first ‘act’ was his Irish campaign of 1599, culminating in a private peace deal with the Earl of Tyrone which was later to be construed as a plot to invade England from Ireland, using the very same troops that had been mustered to maintain Elizabeth’s sovereignty there. The second act culminated in the ‘Rising’ of 8 February 1601 and concluded with Essex’s execution. However, there was a major prologue or ‘induction’ to Essex’s two-act tragedy. This was what ensued from John Hayward’s First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, first published, and dedicated (in Latin) to Essex, in February 1599. In the dedicatory epistle Hayward praised Essex

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as a man already great, but greater still in terms of his future expectations. As Forker points out, this ‘could be interpreted as suggesting him as heir apparent to the throne’.66 Though Hayward quickly added a public apology to a revised edition from which the dedication to Essex was omitted, the harm was apparently done. Hayward was interrogated repeatedly about his motives for writing this book, and remained a prisoner in the Tower until after Elizabeth’s death. Hayward’s historical narrative, mainly focused on the downfall of Richard II, and covering only the first year of the reign of Henry IV, was almost certainly influenced by Shakespeare’s play.67 Since Hayward got into such serious trouble, we may wonder why Shakespeare and his fellows escaped censure, and his play escaped total suppression, especially after Essex’s unlicensed return from Ireland in late September 1599 and subsequent house arrest. While things looked worse and worse for Hayward, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men apparently continued to perform this play for Essex and his cronies, and three printings of it made it available to a wider circle of book-buyers. The explanation is probably both internal and external. Internally, Hayward’s text was offensive in ways that a play, with its constantly shifting viewpoints, could avoid. For instance, Hayward’s account of the malpractices that led to Richard’s deep unpopularity was frank and unsparing. In Shakespeare’s play Gaunt’s reproaches to Richard could be received as the bitter and biased outburst of a dying man who believed that his own son’s claim to the throne was at least as strong as Richard’s, and his gifts for rule superior. But Hayward delivered the charges against Richard in the more definitive voice of a sober and apparently impartial historian: The profits and revenues of the crowne were said to bee let to farme, the King making himselfe landlord of this realme, and challenged no great priviledge by his reigne, but onely a dissolute and uncontrouled life. Great summes of mony were yearly, rather exacted from the

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subjects, then by them voluntarily graunted: whereof no good did ensue, but the maintenance of the Kings private delightes, & the advancement of his hatefull favorites.68 Shakespeare, more tactfully, had confined Richard’s ‘hatefull favorites’ to the margins of his play, and provided the audience with no immediate image of the king’s ‘private delightes’ and profligacy. Though his Richard seems callow and self-willed, especially in his response to Gaunt’s impending death, we never see him feasting or sporting extravagant clothes or jewels. Externally, Hayward’s book was also troublesome in ways that Shakespeare’s play had not been when it was new, for by the time of its publication Richard’s troubles with rebellion in Ireland were vividly paralleled in the major escalation of rebellion there in the summer of 1598. In the last two acts of Shakespeare’s play Richard’s presentation of himself as an anointed monarch whose person is sacred, and even as a Christ-figure, riding humbly into London as Christ rode into Jerusalem, is one that Elizabeth herself probably admired, whether she saw the play performed or read a text of it. Another much-quoted remark to Lambarde, ‘I am Richard II. know ye not that?’, has been construed in too narrow a sense, as if it alluded only to mischievous applications of the parallel by others, whether Shakespeare, Hayward or Essex. I believe that she herself embraced the identification, and had done so for some years, finding in it matter both for anxiety and consolation. This is suggested by the penultimate exchange in Lambarde’s audience, a digression from her primary preoccupation with laws governing the financial obligations of subjects to monarchs: Her Majestie . . . Then returning to Richard II, she demanded, ‘Whether I had seen any true picture, or lively representation of his countenance and person?’ W.L. ‘None but such as bee in common hands.’ Her Majesty. ‘The Lord Lumley a lover of antiquities, dis-

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covered it fastened on the backside of a door of a base room: which he presented unto me, praying, with my good leave, that I would put it in order with the Ancestors and Successors; I will command Tho: Kneavet, Keeper of my House and Gallery at Westminster, to shew it unto thee.’69 Thomas Knyvett had been appointed as Keeper of Whitehall Palace by 1597, though it is possible that Lambarde was too frail to make a visit there to admire the ‘true picture’ of King Richard before his death. The exchange shows Elizabeth as especially curious about Richard II as an ‘Ancestor’ with whom she recognized that she had much in common. The pleasure she took in acquiring and viewing the portrait she mentions sprang from fellow feeling. Even in recent times, readings of the remarkable Lambarde audience have been coloured by a limited perception of the elderly Elizabeth as a tetchy, moody, Flora Robson-like character. There has been too little acknowledgement of her intense and knowledgeable interest in her royal predecessors, both recent, such as her ‘good Grandfather King Henry VII’, whose frugality she praised to Lambarde, and more distant ones, such as Richard II. Carrying the identification of herself with Richard to its full extent meant embracing the probability both of deposition and assassination. As the prosecutor Sir Edward Coke remarked during the trial of Essex and Southampton – this rhetorical question being addressed to the latter – ‘Note but the precedents of former ages, how long lived Richard the Second after he was surprised in the same manner?70 The pretence was alike for the removing of certain counsellors, but yet shortly after it cost him his life.’71 Elizabeth had shown remarkable equanimity in the face of previous attempts on her life. Illustrating her mercifulness, Henry Chettle recalled the incident of the man who ‘shot the Gunne off against Greenwich, even into her Majesties Barge, [and] hurt the man next to her, at broade daylight’, whom she fully pardoned just as he was about to be hanged.72 Later, she weathered that inauspicious year 1599, the bicentenary of Richard II’s

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deposition and death. But the unlicensed and unheralded irruption of Essex into her bedchamber at Nonsuch, the mud of Ireland still sticking to his boots and beard, was a very different matter, as an invasion of her most private space. It was viewed by her advisers, especially Robert Cecil, as a close-run thing. That was to be the last day when Essex was in her presence. Elizabeth lived on to survive the most serious and distressing challenge ever made to her life and reign, that twelve-hour wonder known as ‘Essex’s Rising’, on Sunday 8 February 1601. But she knew that she was not immortal, whatever some of her poets might claim. In the final weeks of her life she refused the ministrations of her physicians and gave up eating. From our modern perspective, we might conjecture that she had some undiagnosed tumour or blockage. But Elizabeth’s perspective was not modern. She was aware that according to several early chroniclers Richard II was not killed by an assassin’s dagger but by cruel and deliberate starvation. This version was mentioned by John Hayward as ‘The most correct report at the time’, but he rejected it because it showed Henry IV as the perpetrator of ‘horrible and unnatural crueltie’.73 However, Elizabeth resolutely re-enacted this mode of death, her self-identification with Richard II continuing to the last.74 Repeated performances of Richard II in private houses and, as suggested by Elizabeth’s remark, more public locations, such as inn-yards, from the winter of 1599 to that of 1600, were symptom rather than cause of the simmering disaffection of Essex and his supporters. Considered with a cool head, Shakespeare’s play offered little comfort to those who proposed to help Essex to become ‘King Robert the First’. Shakespeare makes it abundantly clear in the play’s brief closing scene that the new king will never sit easy on his throne. He will be continually tormented with guilt within and rebellion without. But Essex’s head was not cool, nor were those of his huge circle of disaffected noblemen and gentlemen. As so many audiences do, they found in the play chiefly what they wanted to find – in this case, a vivid image of a childless and unpopular monarch being deposed in favour of a popular nobleman whom (s)he has cast out of favour.

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The performance of the play that took place at the Globe on the previous day, Saturday 7 February, was something novel. It was commissioned by Sir Charles Percy, fourth son of the 8th Earl of Northumberland, and a fan of Shakespeare’s history plays. Some time after 1603 he was to report to a friend – probably Dudley Carleton – that after staying at his house at Dumbleton in Gloucestershire he had become ‘so dull that I shall be taken for Justice Silence or Justice Shallow’.75 But it was not pure admiration for Shakespeare’s art that prompted Percy’s bribe to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform Richard II publicly at the Globe on 7 February. As Mark Nicholls has shown, Percy was a close associate of Essex. Essex had knighted him in France in 1591, and he had held commands under Essex both on the ‘Islands Voyage’ of 1597 and in Ireland, where he remained until November 1600.76 His absence from England during most of 1600 may have led to a certain naivety about his great patron’s current position and prospects. To what extent Charles Percy, his younger brother Josceline, Lord Mounteagle and other noblemen had truly been manipulated by Essex’s Welsh steward and fixer Sir Gelly Meyrick, we shall probably never know. All that is certain is that Meyrick was identified, along with the Oxford academic Henry Cuffe, as chief engineer of the ‘Rising’. Both of these men were of humble origins, and were hanged as traitors, while nothing much happened to the noblemen. They were supposed to pay large fines, but for the most part managed not to do so.77 Paul Hammer claims that ‘there is no evidence that the play [at the Globe] was intended to rouse the London commons to action’.78 Yet the very insistence of Percy and his noble friends that this had to be a public performance at the large Globe, rather than a private one in a small indoor location, which might seem more appropriate in frosty February, furnishes such evidence. The comments made subsequently by Augustine Phillips that the play was ‘so old & so long out of use as that they shold have small or no Company at yt’ were somewhat disingenuous.79 Though the play was more than five years old, it had enjoyed several recent revivals under Essex’s patronage, some in his presence. But Phillips’s

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point would not hold unless the expectation on this occasion was that London’s paying public would come to the theatre in the nor mal way. This wasn’t, as Hammer suggests, primarily a performance for aristocrats which enabled them to admire the exploits of their ancestors. It was a performance open to theatregoers at large. The company needed good money at the door, for the enhanced fee paid by Percy would not fully defray all the expenses of a large public performance, such as procuring coal for heating the theatre and having playbills printed and posted. But given intense and widespread excitement about Essex and his circle there was probably a good turnout of Londoners even on a cold February afternoon. Rumour will have informed the citizens that they would have a chance to view not only Shakespeare’s brilliant and increasingly topical-seeming play, but also a bumper crop of splendidly dressed young noblemen in the Lords’ Room. A notable absentee was Essex himself, still under house arrest, and trying to calm his nerves with a game of tennis. The performance at the Globe may possibly have been the immediate trigger for the sensational events that ensued. According to Hammer, ‘In the late afternoon [of 7 February], however, Essex suddenly received an order to go to the Lord Treasurer’s house to consult with the Privy Council about intelligence of a new Spanish Armada’.80 As Hammer points out, Essex rightly suspected that this was a trap, and that evening he twice refused to go. The trap may have been ‘suddenly’ sprung precisely because news had reached the Privy Council of an unusual performance taking place at the Globe on a winter afternoon, with a large and potentially dangerous concourse of London citizens soon to emerge in the city streets. Next morning, since Essex had repeatedly refused to come out of his house to meet members of the Privy Council, members of the Privy Council came to his house to meet him there, only to be held prisoner in Essex House for several hours. So long a prisoner himself, Essex at last rode out from his house, leading his followers right into the City of London, rather than turning left towards Westminster and the court, as many had expected. But if he hoped that the citizens who had flocked to see

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Richard II at the Globe on Saturday afternoon would flock with equal alacrity to join his personal crusade to rescue the Queen from her evil councillors on Sunday morning, he was badly mistaken. The Lord Mayor and his aldermen took their orders from the Privy Council, not from the charismatic but impulsive Earl, and the citizens naturally followed suit. There has been much puzzlement that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men appear to have suffered little, if at all, as a result of their close association with Essex’s ill-fated ‘Rising’. But they enjoyed twofold protection. On the one hand, they were lowly ‘grooms’, who could not be reasonably expected to refuse a pressing request made by sons of an earl, such as Sir Charles Percy and his brother, especially if the rewards were generous. On the other hand, they were not any old ‘grooms’, but royal servants, even though their attendance at court was only seasonal. Ultimately, they were under the protection of the mighty Lord Chamberlain, a Privy Councillor and a close kinsman of the Queen. Neither he nor his royal mistress wished to lose the service of such an outstandingly gifted troupe. Augustine Phillips, as their spokesman, was questioned by Justices Popham and Fenner. But this seems to have been more for the purpose of gathering evidence against Essex’s confederates than because the players themselves were under suspicion of treason. There is no record that the Chamberlain’s Men received any punishment, and it is clear that their position of favour was unchallenged. On 24 February 1601 they performed once again at court, as they had done on the preceding Christmas Day and Twelfth Night. This was Shrove Tuesday, or Carnival, the final day available for merrymaking before Lent. It was also the eve of the date set for the execution of Essex in the Tower of London. I think we can be quite sure that on this occasion the play the company performed was not Richard II. It is highly likely that it was a play by Shakespeare, and a comedy of a strongly festive character. Among the possibilities are Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor or a play whose title, in this context, said it all: Much Ado About Nothing.

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iii. earths beauteous phoenix One of the few casualties on the day of Essex’s ‘Rising’ was a Welsh gentleman called Owen Salusbury, a Catholic, who was fatally shot ‘by a sniper on the steeple of St Clement Danes’.81 In total contrast, a cousin of his, John Salusbury, was among the gentlemen who came to the armed defence of the Queen on that same day. Already appointed by her as an Esquire of the Body in 1595, he was rewarded for his military defence of her on 8 February by being personally knighted in June 1601. In lineage as in loyalty, Sir John Salusbury was diametrically opposed to his cousin Owen. He was a direct, though illegitimate, descendant of Henry VII through his mother Katherine of Berain, also known as Catherine Tudor. Indeed, Salusbury’s lineage was such that if he hoped for advancement at court it was necessary for him to present himself as extraordinarily, preternaturally, loyal and submissive, in order to allay any suspicion that he viewed himself as a possible successor to Elizabeth. He did this in part through a curious allegory in which Salusbury was identified with the peace-loving turtle-dove, a bird in this instance so passionately devoted to a golden female Phoenix that he is determined to die with her in the flames from which a mysterious and immaterial successor will arise. It is difficult to know how much of this allegory was Salusbury’s own invention, and how much had been devised by Robert Chester, a close associate of Salusbury’s at this time. Chester’s Loves martyr, published in 1601, is conspicuously and repeatedly dedicated to Salusbury. It was printed by Richard Field, who had been the original publisher and printer of Shakespeare’s narrative poems. By 1601 Field’s printing and publishing activities were so wide that this does not necessarily suggest any involvement of Shakespeare in the process of getting the strange verse compilation into print. But Chester appears to have been familiar with Shakespeare’s poems. In short prefatory verses ‘To the kind Reader’ he includes ‘Lucrece rape’ among poetical themes that are not those of Loves martyr; and allusions to ‘a Castalian

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boule’ and ‘flame-hair’d Apollos hand’ in the two poems prefaced to the appended group of Poeticall Essaies elaborate the Ovidian epigraph included on the title-page of Venus and Adonis (see above, p. 130). Shakespeare himself may have been part author of these latter poems, attributed to ‘Vatum Chorus’, that is, a chorus of the poets.82 What exactly led to the compilation and publication of Loves martyr has never been fully explained, and probably never will be. But it appears to be connected to Sir John Salusbury’s campaign to represent Denbigh in the Parliament, Elizabeth’s last, that opened on 27 October 1601. Both the Queen and Robert Cecil supported Salusbury’s candidature, but conflicts with Sir Richard Trevor, a rival candidate in Denbighshire, delayed the election until 16 December, by which time the Parliament had only three days to run.83 Allusions both to ‘Parliament’ and to current preoccupations with royal succession are suggested in the title of Chester’s poem: ‘Rosalins Complaint, Metaphorically applied to Dame Nature at a Parliament held (in the high Starchamber) by the Gods, for the preservation and increase of Earths beauteous Phoenix.’ As retailed at considerable length, the golden Phoenix is deeply unhappy and mistrustful because of onslaughts recently made on her by ‘Foule bleare-eyed Envie’ – presumably alluding to Essex’s Rising. However, with Dame Nature’s help, ‘Envie’ is miraculously banished, and the Phoenix is transported on an aerial journey to ‘Paphos’ (England), where her destined mate, the silver turtle-dove, awaits. He expresses his love for the Phoenix in language resembling that of a subservient courtier: ‘let me kneele to thee, / And offer up my true obedience’. In a chaste and sexless union the two birds immolate themselves on a sweet-scented pyre, witnessed only by a virtuous Pelican, who describes the event admiringly. Some sort of mystical offspring, also female, arises from the flames. This may correspond with some desirable abstract concept, such as ‘Peace’, but if so, it is not made clear. In the Poeticall Essaies appended to Chester’s poems five or more poets elaborate this allegory in lyric verse. Shakespeare,

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Marston, Chapman and Jonson are named, and at least one further poet, labelled ‘Ignotus’, appears to have contributed. The poems are described on their title-page both as new – ‘never before extant’ – and as all ‘consecrated’ by the poets ‘to the love and merite of the true-noble Knight, Sir John Salisburie’. When considering Shakespeare’s contribution, the untitled verses known as ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, we need to bear in mind that like the other four poets he was required to work within an allegorical framework already set in place by Chester. If the ‘parliamentary’ context described above was an important factor, it is likely that the appended poems were composed at some speed. Jonson, a notoriously slow writer, recycled one poem that he had already written, despite the title-page’s claim to the poems’ novelty. Shakespeare’s verses have been hugely admired in modern times. I shall not attempt a close analysis of them here. In this context, in which my chief concern is with his evolving status, I want simply to note that his funereal verses come first. As a ‘Groom of the Chamber’, Shakespeare enjoyed higher status than the other three named poets and playwrights who contributed to the collection. It is also interesting to observe that when gathered together in a common ‘courtly’ endeavour, for which it can be assumed they were promised good rewards, these four writers (plus A.N. Other) could work collaboratively, rather as they sometimes had to do when writing plays to a tight deadline. Chapman had attacked Shakespeare a few years earlier (see above, p. 130); Jonson appears to have attacked Marston in Every Man Out of his Humour, and was to do so again, much more prominently, in Poetaster; and Marston himself, the youngest of the four, had already established himself as a writer of indiscriminate satires attacking pretty much everyone. However, like so many young men by the turn of the century, Marston was an admirer of Shakespeare. This is shown in the first line of the poem by him which immediately follows Shakespeare’s ‘Phoenix and Turtle’ – ‘O Twas a moving Epicedium!’ – and had already been apparent in two of the satires included in his Scourge of Villainie (1599). He adapts a line of Shakespeare’s that had already become a

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catchphrase, ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’ (R3 5.4.7) as ‘A Man, a man, a kingdome for a man’, making this the central conceit of a satire in which he laments the fact that ‘real men’ are a thing of the past. Later in the same volume Marston attacks a man who speaks ‘Naught but pure Juliat and Romio’, extracting his derivative wit from ‘wellpenn’d playes’.84 Loves martyr does not appear to have been successful in promoting Salusbury’s career beyond the bare three days during which he held a seat in Parliament. It may have prompted some interest as a curiosity. Unsold sheets of the poems, but not the preliminaries, were issued by Matthew Lownes in 1611 under the new title of The annuals of Great Brittaine. This drew attention to Chester’s long account of King Arthur and ancient British history. Early readers may have been as confused and baffled as modern ones have been by his elaborate allegory of ‘dead birds’ immolated in a ‘mutual flame’. I wonder whether Elizabeth herself gave the book more than a glance. She was probably more interested in such vivid creations as Sir John Falstaff and the cruelly wronged King Richard.

SEVEN SWEET SWAN OF AVON! kempe Few of the university [men] pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphoses, and talke too much of Proserpina & Juppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit. (The Second Return from Parnassus, c. 1602)1 Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appeare, And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames, That so did take Eliza, and our James! (Ben Jonson, 1623)

i. our fellow In this study I have been concerned with two main aspects of Shakespeare’s reputation: his cultural status, both among the learned and with the wider public; and his social standing, as a man who was by birth the son of a provincial glover and thus, like Daisy Ashford’s Mr Salteena, ‘not quite a gentleman’.2 Early social disadvantages were further compounded by his profession as an actor. His creative brilliance, however, was recognized early, and widely confirmed. The first quotation at the head of this chapter indicates the cultural prominence he had achieved by the end of the reign of Elizabeth, while the second, Jonson’s posthumous tribute, elevates him to a spirit of visionary brilliance who deservedly won royal favour.

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The tribute paid to him by ‘Kempe’ might at first glance seem to be a piece of special pleading or cronyism, coming from the mouth of a fellow actor, albeit one of the most technically accomplished among Shakespeare’s ‘fellows’. But this is a fictionalized Kempe. The lines he speaks were written by one Cambridge student to be performed by another. The Kempe-character’s lack of learning is caricatured in his clownish belief that Metamorphoses is the name of a writer rather than a work. Like Jonson’s long poem, the speech is a tribute from a scholar to a natural-born genius. As a whole, the two Kempe/Burbage scenes present Cambridge students as far outclassed, both as vernacular writers and public speakers, by men of lesser education but natural talent. After a humiliating session of auditioning with Burbage, the play’s disaffected heroes, Philomusus and Studioso, abandon their scheme to make a living as players, descending to a desperate, and equally unrewarding, attempt to earn money as ‘fiddlers’. Finally they embrace the vocation they have tried so hard to avoid, going off to become poorly paid country clergy. This, at least, is how I read Philomusus’s proposal that he and his friend settle for ‘A Shepherd’s poor secure contented life’, which will require them to watch over their ‘bleating flock[s]’.3 Another Cambridge graduate, Edmund Spenser, had used such imagery to allude to clergy of the Church of England.4 We do not know the identity of the authors of any of the three ‘Parnassus Plays’. However, we can be fairly confident that writers and performers alike were members of St John’s College, Cambridge, for whose Christmas holidays the plays were composed in the years 1598–1601/2.5 The first play focuses on the struggles of Philomusus and Studioso to reach ‘Parnassus’, that is, to obtain their bachelor’s degrees in Cambridge. The second and third show them seeking patronage and/or employment in worlds beyond the university. The quotation above comes from the third and most interesting of the three, and perhaps its most fascinating scene. This play’s superiority was immediately recognized. Not only did it apparently enjoy a repeat performance at St John’s in 1602–3,6 but alone of the three plays it reached print. It was

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published by John Wright early in 1606, and apparently sold well, since it was reprinted, with numerous small corrections, later that same year.7 From 1606, therefore, the Cambridge students’ tribute to Shakespeare, with their scornful words about the ‘pestilent’ Jonson, was in the public domain. For Shakespeare, once publicly attacked as an upstart and ignorant player too big for his buskins, such an enthusiastic tribute from ‘university men’ must have been particularly gratifying. It can be viewed as the culmination of many admiring responses from Shakespeare’s Elizabethan fan club, some of whose other members were discussed in Chapters 2 and 5. In 1 Return tribute had been paid to the rhetorical and poetic ‘sweetness’ of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet, so much admired as to be slavishly imitated, as well as to a cult of Shakespeare that meant that portraits of him were in great demand. Confirming Shakespeare’s popularity at court, discussed in the previous chapter, the wealthy but vacuous courtier Gullio also commissions an elegantly penned text of Venus and Adonis to keep under his pillow.8 Early on in 2 Return a survey of contemporary poets records the continued popularity of Shakespeare’s narrative poems: ‘Who loves not Adon’s love, or Lucrece’ rape?’9 The speaker is Iudicio, who as his name suggests is a young man of good judgement. Shakespeare is an even more immediate presence later on in 2 Return, as the admired and loved ‘fellow’ of Kempe and Burbage. It feels as if he is just off stage, though he never actually enters. We should also notice here that ‘Kempe’s’ phrase ‘our fellow’, rather than ‘our poet’, draws attention to his membership of the Chamberlain’s Men as another leading player, rather than his other role as the company’s ‘ordinary’ playwright, who had no ‘fellow’. The jobless graduate Studioso, addressed clownishly by Kempe as ‘Otioso’, i.e. Signor Lazy, is given an opportunity to prove his histrionic mettle by performing the best-known speech of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, after which Burbage tells him, rather coolly, that ‘You will do well after a while’.10 His friend Philomusus is first tried out in the role of ‘a foolish justice of the peace’, delivering a pompous moral homily in prose. Burbage then remarks that ‘I like your face and the proportion of

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your body for Richard the 3’ – suggesting that Philomusus is evillooking and crooked – and lets him attempt Richard’s great opening speech beginning ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’. Earlier, Kempe had boasted to the Cambridge men about the wealth and fame brought by the ‘playhouse’ both to Burbage and himself: be merry my lads, you have happened upon the most excellent vocation in the world: for money, they come North and South to bring it to our playhouse, and for honour, who of more report then Dick Burbage and Will Kempe? He’s not counted a gentleman that knows not Dick Burbage and Will Kempe.11 However, the St John’s graduates have too little natural talent and popular appeal to make their fortunes as players. They will never be stars, like Burbage and Kempe. The best they can hope for is occasional piece-work ‘at a hireling rate’.12 In performance in St John’s hall I imagine they delivered their set-piece speeches from Kyd and Shakespeare with laughable ineptitude.13 The second quotation at the head of this chapter, from Jonson, transports Shakespeare’s reputation to a higher realm. It pertains to the ‘First Folio’ collection of his plays, eighteen of them never previously printed, which gave conspicuous and enduring life to his dramatic writings. Like many much-used symbols the swan has a variety of connotations. Here, we should lay aside the myth of the mute swan that finds its lyric voice only in death. Neither literally nor symbolically is this applicable to Shakespeare’s career, though it was a myth with which he himself was familiar.14 His own best writing was done in his middle years. Though he may never have fully retired either from London or from the stage, his rate of productivity undoubtedly diminished in the Jacobean period, and after The Tempest in 1611 there were no more singleauthored plays, though several collaborative ones. But the white swan is also associated with purity, dignity, beauty and – perhaps most aptly, with reference to the lines quoted from Jonson’s poem – lofty status. In classical mythology, Jove, the King of Olympus,

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metamorphosed himself into a white swan in order to seduce Leda, the mother of Helen. Both Henry IV and Henry V, kings whose reigns Shakespeare had so vividly brought to life on stage, used a silver swan as an image on a heraldic badge.15 Live swans on some of the lower reaches of the River Thames were, and still are, ‘royal’. Ever since the twelfth century they have been the monarch’s preserve. In the Tudor period – as now – they were associated with annual ceremonies and rituals at the time of ‘swan-upping’ in late July. The antiquary John Leland entitled a topographical poem tracing his journey along the Thames Cygnea Cantio, or ‘Swan Song’ (1546).16 Both the abundance of swans on the Thames, and their royal ownership, were remarked on by Frederick, Duke of Würtemberg, when he visited England in 1592.17 In 1596 another visitor to London, Jan de Witt, made a remarkable drawing of the unusually large Swan theatre, built in 1596 by Francis Langley. Its name, and the motif on its banner, presumably alluded to the Thames swans.18 Jonson praises Shakespeare for having triumphed where he himself had tried and failed. While Jonson was eventually to succeed as a deviser of court masques, Shakespeare had written full-length plays that were greatly appreciated by Elizabethan and Jacobean courtiers as well as by theatregoers. Jonson’s blunder in Every Man Out in bringing a boy actor on stage to impersonate the Queen has already been mentioned (p. 211). Cynthia’s Revels, his blatant attempt to promote the merits of ‘Crites’/Jonson as a writer for the court and a special favourite of ‘Cynthia’/the Queen, was even less successful, in so far as it did not achieve court performance. In contrast, as we saw in the preceding chapter, Elizabeth, together with many of her leading courtiers, appears to have had a lively appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays, above all his English history plays. In his own person, James was a less attentive auditor than his predecessor. But marvellously full evidence from the Revels Accounts early in the reign shows that James’s Scottish courtiers were eager to encounter Shakespeare’s plays as performed by the King’s own newly adopted company. Between 1 November 1604

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and 31 October 1605 the King’s Men performed at court eleven times. Seven of their plays were by Shakespeare, and The Merchant of Venice was not only performed on Shrove Sunday 1605 but also ‘Againe Commanded By the Kings Majestie’ on Shrove Tuesday.19 Only two plays by Jonson, the ‘Humours comedies’, were performed that season, on 8 and 9 January 1605. A few years later, in the winter of 1611–12, the King’s Men are recorded as having performed Shakespeare’s two latest plays, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, at court, but no play by Jonson. As discussed in Chapter 3, there appear to have been rumours in the first decade of the reign that both Shakespeare and Burbage might benefit from the King’s lavishly ennobling hand. No such rumours attached to the former bricklayer and convicted felon Jonson, despite his impressive array of aristocratic friends and patrons. Shakespeare was a swan ‘of Avon’ in the same limited sense in which the father of Henry Bolingbroke was John ‘of Gaunt’. The latter was born in Ghent; Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. But the Warwickshire Avon was not the location of his success. In maturity, Shakespeare was celebrated for his achievements ‘upon the bankes of Thames’ – so much so that in the lines quoted Jonson imagines his reappearance metamorphosed into a swan seen in flight above the river. Formerly, he had accomplished his great theatrical ‘flights’ not only in the Bankside theatres, but in royal palaces which abutted the great river, such as Whitehall, Richmond and Greenwich. In such locations, his ‘flights’ – plays written by Shakespeare in which he himself also appeared as a performer – ‘took’, that is, captivated, both Elizabeth I and James I.20 Jonson’s poem marks the posthumous fulfilment of Shakespeare’s aspirations. He was at last publicly celebrated by one of his most able contemporaries as a superlative poet who deservedly won royal favour. The fact that Jonson was not temperamentally much inclined to praise his fellow poets gave his eulogy additional force. Jonson’s tribute to Shakespeare as ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’ was echoed and endorsed by the King’s Men of a later generation and reign. The ‘First Folio’ of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, published in 1647 during that bleak period when all the public

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Fig. 8. Ben Jonson, friend, rival and reluctant admirer of Shakespeare.

theatres had been closed by order of Parliament, was closely modelled on the Shakespeare Folio of 1623. It was dedicated to the survivor of those two ‘incomparable brethren’ to whom Heminge and Condell had dedicated Shakespeare’s plays. Led by John Lowin and by Burbage’s successor Joseph Taylor, the players allude, in the passage quoted below, both to Heminge and Condell, leading King’s Men ‘who once steered in our qualitie’; to the two great Herbert brothers who favoured Shakespeare’s

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‘flowing compositions’; and to Avon’s ‘Swan’, ‘then expired’. They present their great collection to Philip Herbert: directed by the example of some, who once steered in our qualitie, and so fortunately aspired to choose your Honour, joyned with your (now glorified) Brother, Patrons to the flowing compositions of the then expired sweet Swan of Avon SHAKESPEARE.21 Jonson’s image of Shakespeare’s metamorphosis into a beautiful royal bird was thus revived, with an even more potent and pointed message, in a very different age, one during which his plays could no longer be performed in public, and monarchy itself was under severe threat. As the unknown authors of 2 Return observed, relations between Jonson and Shakespeare had not always been so cordial. As with the great paper-wars between Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe a few years earlier, surviving evidence leaves us unable to judge how far the ‘war’ between Jonson and Shakespeare expressed genuine animosity, and how far it was rough blokeish banter and/or a mutually profitable publicity stunt. Yet there is no doubt that Jonson did make many spiteful-seeming sallies against Shakespeare, some public, some private. In Every Man Out of his Humour, for instance, he ridiculed two practices of which Shakespeare was guilty, though the characters who perpetrate them are not portraits of Shakespeare. An upwardly mobile provincial called Sogliardo purchases a grant of arms from the heralds, as Shakespeare had done in 1596. As we have seen, its absurd motto, ‘Not without mustard’, clearly mimics Shakespeare’s ‘NON SANZ DROICT’ – ‘Not without right’. Sogliardo’s brother Sordido is a miserly farmer, who welcomes bad harvests because they allow him to hoard valuable commodities and to sell them to the starving at a high price. Shakespeare himself had been reported as hoarding malt in New Place during a period of shortage in 1598.22 However, according to the very clued-up authors of 2 Return quoted above, Shakespeare eventually gave as good as he got. In particular, it seems that he responded to Jonson’s

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Poetaster, at the end of which two of Shakespeare’s younger friends, Marston and Dekker, are publicly humiliated, by administering a ‘purge’ to Jonson that caused his reputation to be publicly blackened. As James Bednarz has shown, the two-year period from the autumn of 1599 to the winter of 1601 saw complex interactions between rival playwrights, rival performers and rival playing companies. Towards the end of this period Shakespeare himself used Hamlet to comment on the ‘Poets’ War’ partly with reference to the rivalry between adult companies and the increasingly lively and satirical children’s companies, and partly with reference to warring poets. In a scene surviving only in the Folio text Rosencrantz and Guildenstern report to Hamlet on the current state of drama in ‘Denmark’: there is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for’t. These are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills and dare scarce come thither . . . there has been much to-do on both sides, and the nation holds it no sin to tar them to controversy. There was for a while no money bid for argument unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.23 This passage may have been omitted from early printings of Hamlet because already, by the time Q1 was published in 1603, the ‘Poets’ War’, with what Guildenstern refers to as ‘much throwing about of brains’, had been definitively resolved. The past tense of the last sentence – ‘There was for a while . . . ’ – also suggests that the battle had been decisively concluded, at least from the viewpoint of Shakespeare and his fellows. Bednarz’s analysis of the period of the ‘Poets’ War’ is rich, full and extremely thought-provoking. He explores and tabulates ‘three waves of contention’, analysing all of the relevant plays in fascinating detail. However, I think he is too ready to dismiss what appears to be the most obvious interchange between Jonson

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and Shakespeare, thus bypassing what may offer the best explanation of the ‘purge’ that the Cambridge students claimed had been delivered to Jonson by Shakespeare. The traditional view, held by Leishman and others, is that the definitive ‘purge’ to Jonson was administered in Dekker’s Satiromastix, an explicit riposte to Jonson’s Poetaster (1601). In Poetaster (the word means ‘second-rate poet’) Jonson had used Horace as a model of a learned and rational poet who shows up the vacuity and incompetence of others, especially Crispinus and Demetrius, generally agreed to be modelled on Marston and Dekker. The Horace of Poetaster is an even more transparent self-projection than that of Jonson as Crites in Cynthia’s Revels. In contrast, in Satiromastix, Horace/Jonson is mercilessly ridiculed throughout. He and his sidekick Asinius Bubo (‘Silly Pimple’) are threatened with whipping, and Horace, with his breeches down, is compelled to agree to a set of tight restrictions on his future behaviour. The essential authenticity of Dekker’s allegations against Jonson is indicated in their acceptance by Jonson’s biographers as a legitimate source of evidence for such matters as Jonson’s physical appearance and dress, his unsuccessful career as a journeyman player, and his slow and laboured methods of composition. Bednarz finds the theory that Satiromastix embodied Shakespeare’s purge of Jonson ‘unconvincing’ because in 2 Return Kempe ‘twice cites Shakespeare as being directly involved in the Poets’ War’ – his testimony being therefore unreliable.24 Bednarz implies that Shakespeare cannot have been ‘directly involved’, despite the Cambridge men’s testimony, because he is not known to have written a rebuttal. However, I believe that Shakespeare may indeed have been ‘directly involved’ in the ‘Poets’ War’, in the shape of Dekker’s decisive counter-attack, which was performed publicly by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, as proclaimed on its title-page, as well as ‘privately’ by Paul’s Boys. But his involvement was that of a performer rather than a writer. As a writer, Shakespeare was exceptionally busy in 1600–2. This period saw the completion of arguably his greatest tragedy,

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Hamlet, and arguably also his best comedy, Twelfth Night. And whether or not it is agreed that Hamlet is his greatest tragedy, it is certainly his longest. The composition of Hamlet was a demanding project even for such a fluent writer as Shakespeare, leaving him no time to write a play specifically devoted to answering Jonson’s attacks – even supposing that he wished to write such a play. But he may have felt angry with Jonson on behalf of someone else. Shakespeare’s 1600–2 plays were closely mirrored in a tragedy and a comedy written for the Paul’s Boys’ company by John Marston, Antonio’s Revenge and What You Will. The exact relationship between these four plays has never been decisively established. My suspicion, as I have argued elsewhere, is that Marston and Shakespeare wrote their plays simultaneously and in friendly emulation.25 There was no hostility either between Shakespeare and Marston or between the respective companies for which they wrote at this time. As Richard Dutton has recently pointed out, ‘there is no evidence that a major company was ever forced on the road by competition from boy actors’.26 The Paul’s Boys, performing under Edward Pearce from 1599 to 1606, offered no threat to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. But staging plays that were thematically linked was an excellent strategy for attracting audiences both to the huge Globe and to the Boys’ small playhouse abutting St Paul’s Cathedral. Rosencrantz’s comment on the currently fashionable ‘eyrie of children’ was a backhanded compliment that could be delivered quite safely, for the ‘tragedians of the city’ were sure to hold their own. My belief is that, far from being hostile rivals, Shakespeare and Marston were good friends, who were working together quite closely in 1600–2. This is suggested by Marston’s tribute to Shakespeare’s verses in Loves martyr (1602) – ‘O Twas a moving Epicedium!’ (see above, p. 231). Shakespeare’s affection for the younger man – a half-Italian Midlander, with close family links to Shakespeare’s friend and ‘cousin’ Thomas Greene – may have caused him to be especially enraged by Jonson’s relentless onslaughts on Marston as ‘Crispinus’ in Poetaster. Dangerous though it may be to extract too much personal information from

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such a source, I think we can deduce from Sonnets 1–126 that Shakespeare had a deep imaginative understanding of the powerful affection that an older man can have for a younger one, just embarking on adult life. Jonson, in contrast, seems, at least in the case of Marston, to have viewed a slightly younger, betterborn and Oxford-educated poet as nothing but a threat and a nuisance. Marston’s particular enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s writings may have been especially irksome to Jonson. He mocked it in Every Man Out of his Humour (1599). Here, ‘two . . . inseparable coxcombes’, Clove and Orange, are caricatures of Marston and his sidekick Dekker. In the ‘Paul’s Walk’ scene, in which the two young men decide to ‘talke fustian’ and pretend to be cleverer than they are, Clove/Marston not only delivers nonsensical words and phrases, such as ‘the Inter-vallum of the Zodiack’ and ‘the vegetable circumference’ but also a nonsensical half-quotation from Shakespeare’s most recent play, Julius Caesar: ‘Reason long since is fled to animals’ (cf. JC 3.2.105). Act 3, scene 1 of Poetaster establishes Horace/Jonson’s intense personal dislike of Crispinus/Marston. However, the scene chronicles the established poet’s extreme irritability, rather than any distinctively tiresome traits of the new poet. The odd, affected words and phrases which Crispinus is compelled to vomit up in the play’s closing scene are not in evidence here. What comes across, rather, is Crispinus’s puppyish eagerness to make friends with Horace since he himself is ‘new turned poet . . . and a satirist too . . . I write just in thy vein’ (3.1.23–5). With so much in common, he hopes they can be friends. But rather than being gratified by the young man’s friendliness, Horace is infuriated by it – most of all, and this at least is understandable, when Crispinus declares his determination to meet Horace’s great patron Maecenas (3.1.231–42). As we saw in Chapter 4 (p. 153), poets fought their bitterest battles over the favours of patrons. Poetaster and Satiromastix are extremely closely linked in time. The former seems to have begun as a pre-emptive strike by Jonson, who had heard rumours that Crispinus’s friend Demetrius (Dekker), a hack-like ‘play-dresser’, or reviser of old plays, was

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at work on a play about the ‘untrussing’ of Horace/himself (Poetaster 4.7.28; 5.3.296). The final scene of Poetaster enacts a wish-fulfilment fantasy in which the Emperor, Augustus Caesar himself, flanked by such great writers as Virgil, Tibullus and Gallus, bestows his imperial blessing on Horace, and presides over the exposure and punishment of Demetrius and Crispinus. Their patron and egger-on, the wittily choleric Captain Tucca, is peremptorily capped with a two-faced mask, symbolizing his hypocrisy, and banished. Demetrius/Dekker freely confesses that he has maligned Horace out of simple envy: ‘he kept better company for the most part than I, and . . . better men loved him than loved me, and . . . his writings thrived better than mine and were better liked and graced’ (5.3.441–5). But the most spectacular and protracted punishment is reserved for Crispinus/Marston, to whom Horace administers two emetic pills. Horace then holds up a basin into which Crispinus fitfully and painfully vomits out strange words, some of which were included in the poem by him that was read aloud earlier in the scene (5.3.269–86): words such as ‘glibbery – Intrical – defunct’; ‘ Puffy – inflate – turgidous – ventositous’; ‘oblatrant – furibund – fatuate – strenuous’ (5.3.465–92). Dekker may have been selected by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to compose their theatrical revenge on Jonson both because he had been attacked in Every Man Out as well as in Poetaster, and because of his established track-record as an exceptionally speedy writer. He is recorded as working on over forty plays for Henslowe between the beginning of 1598 and the end of 1602.27 His collaborative activities apparently included working with Marston on Lust’s Dominion, also known as The Spanish Moor’s Tragedy (1599/1600), which they later recycled for performance by the Paul’s Boys.28 This is alluded to in Satiromastix when Horace accuses ‘Crispinus . . . and Fannius his Play-dresser’ of having ‘cut an Innocent Moore i’th’middle, to serve him in twice; and when he had done, made Powles-work of it’.29 This particular Dekker– Marston collaboration may lie behind Jonson’s presentations of ‘Clove’ and ‘Orange’ in Every Man Out (see above), as well as his depictions of Crispinus and Demetrius Fannus in Poetaster.

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It seems to have been slightly unusual for Dekker to write for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men rather than for the Lord Admiral’s. However, there is a Henslowe record that suggests that in the winter of 1598–9 the Chamberlain’s company commissioned him to write something for them, which he failed to deliver. On 30 January 1599 Henslowe recorded a payment of £3 10s. to Thomas Downton ‘to descarge Thomas dickers frome the a reaste [arrest] of my lord chamberlenes men’.30 Perhaps the work for which the Chamberlain’s Men had paid him an advance was the play set in the court of William Rufus that was eventually to provide a nonsatiric framework for Satiromastix. Though he has often been sidelined as a ‘Henslowe hack’, Dekker’s work in this period enjoyed notable success. His revised version of Old Fortunatus was performed before the Queen in December 1599, and what is still his best-known comedy, The Shoemakers’ Holiday, was performed at court on New Year’s Day 1600. The Chamberlain’s Men probably knew that in return for a good fee Dekker would compose a suitably devastating riposte to Jonson’s Poetaster, and deliver it speedily. Even for Dekker, however, this deadline was tight. He may already have been at work on a romantic tragedy or tragicomedy set in the Norman court of King William Rufus, and he appears to have met the request for a satiric action directed against [Jonson] by the simple expedient of inserting it, at whatever cost to dramatic congruity, into his pseudo-historical romance.31 This play seems already to have included two noblemen, Sir Quintilian Shorthose, on whose chaste and newly espoused daughter Caelestine the King has evil designs, and her new husband Sir Walter Terrill. The interlaced comical/satirical plot introduces two elderly knights, Sir Adam Prickshaft and Sir Rees ap Vaughan, usually addressed as ‘Sir Vaughan’. The surname of the former seems to glance at the name ‘Shakespeare’. However, I believe that the latter character was Shakespeare’s role, for it is he who delivers the conclusive ‘purge’ to Horace/Jonson that was celebrated in 2 Return.

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The possibility that Shakespeare played Sir Vaughan may have been overlooked because the character speaks throughout in an exaggerated stage-Welsh accent, which modern readers will find quite tiresome to read and decode. However, Shakespeare’s very recent composition of stage-Welsh speeches both for Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives and for Fluellen in Henry V shows that this was a dialect in which he was perfectly fluent. He could hardly have written such speeches without having a full mastery both of how ‘Welsh’ English was to be notated and how it should be pronounced. He also included lines cued as spoken in Welsh, and a Welsh song, in 1 Henry IV (3.1.188–208; 240). Early on in Satiromastix it is indicated that Sir Vaughan has a particular grudge against ‘that file rascall-rymer Horace’. He suspects that Horace has maligned him to the King (2.1.101–217). Though it soon transpires that the King hasn’t even heard of Horace, Sir Vaughan’s determination to humiliate the vile rascalrhymer persists. In Act 3 Sir Vaughan invites Horace, along with everyone else, to his house for ‘a dinner of Plumbes’, at which the self-conceited poet is to compose and deliver a eulogy upon hair, and to rail against baldness. This he does in Act 4, scene 1, which opens with ‘A banquet set out’. Horace praises hair with ingenious reference to the four elements. Hair-like excrescences, he eloquently argues, are generated by all of them: flames by Fire, waves by Water, clouds ‘like fine silver hayre’ by Air, and green vegetation by Earth. This is quite ingenious. However, no one praises Horace’s speech apart from his sycophantic sidekick Asinius Bubo. There is a line in the scene that may have made an impression on the authors of 2 Return. After the other banqueters have gone Asinius Bubo tells his ‘ingle’ Horace that ‘the Welsh Knight has given me nothing but purging comfits’. After the banquet, in 4.3, Crispinus (Marston) is commissioned by Sir Adam Prickshaft, who is himself bald, to deliver a eulogy of baldness. Like that of Horace, the speech by Crispinus is in rhyming couplets. It is both longer and more ambitious, with sun and moon invoked as celestial bald heads, while a human head ‘all naked and uncrown’d . . . is the worlds Globe, even, smooth and

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round’ (4.3.48–9). This would be readily recognized as an ‘inhouse’ allusion by those who saw the play performed by the Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe theatre in the autumn of 1601. The full intricacies of the comic plot of Satiromastix, including the rivalry between Sir Vaughan, Sir Adam and Captain Tucca for the favours of the widow Mistress Miniver, which provides a flimsy pretext for the ‘baldness’ debate, are too numerous to be rehearsed here. An obvious but teasing question is whether Shakespeare’s own receding hairline was part of the joke. However, I want, rather, to leap to the play’s closing sequence. The melodramatic and tragi-comic sufferings of the chaste Caelestine are eventually resolved, and Crispinus offers the King a ‘Comicall event’ to celebrate the delayed nuptials of Caelestine and Sir Walter Terrill. This takes the form of the ritual humiliation of ‘A humorous dreadfull Poet’, and it is both led and decisively concluded by Sir Vaughan. The entrance of Horace and Asinius Bubo ‘pul’d in by th’hornes bound, both like Satyres’ has strong echoes of the entrance of Sir John Falstaff ‘with buck’s horns on his head’ in the final scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor (5.5). Horace makes his unredeemed satirical bitterness visible by disguising himself as a horned and hairy-legged satyr, while Falstaff is visibly identified with lust by being shown as a stag in rut. In that play, too, it is a Welshman, Sir Hugh Evans, who masterminds the ensuing physical punishment, in which Falstaff is pinched by Sir Hugh’s schoolboys disguised as fairies. However, the public humiliation of Horace in Satiromastix is far more savage and prolonged. According to Crispinus (Marston), who functions as Master of the Revels, emetic pills, such as those administered to the character in Poetaster who bears the same name, would be too good for the correction of Horace (Jonson). Instead, Horace and his sidekick Asinius Bubo are threatened with being savagely whipped with nettles. Sir Vaughan commands Horace to ‘untrusse’, that is, to remove his satyr-leg breeches, in readiness for this punishment. As a foretaste of further pain to ensue, Sir Vaughan places a wreath of stinging nettles on his head: ‘nay by Sesu you shall bee a Poet, though not Lawrefyed, yet Nettlefyed’. Next, Horace

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is exposed as a fake. Tucca shows that this man does not in the least resemble the great Roman poet whose name he has so arrogantly assumed. To demonstrate the point both to onstage and offstage audiences he displays two portraits, one depicting the true Horace, with his ‘trim long-beard, and a reasonable good face for a Poet’, and the other representing the ugly and pock-marked imposter, i.e. Jonson. This device has been prepared for in the stage direction at 5.2.155, when Tucca enters, ‘his boy after him with two pictures under his cloake’. In a parallel not, I think, previously noted, the episode recalls the scene in Hamlet in which Hamlet forces his mother (and also the audience?) to ‘Look here upon this picture, and on this’, and to observe the extreme difference between the noble old Hamlet as ‘Hyperion’ and the gross ‘satyr’ Claudius. (3.4.51–4; 1.2.140). Perhaps the Lord Chamberlain’s Men used the very same picture props in Satiromastix. As presiding judge, Sir Vaughan commands Asinius Bubo to cease to be Horace’s hanger-on, or to call him his ‘ingle’. Bubo readily agrees, and exits. Sir Vaughan then ceremonially imposes many detailed restrictions on Horace’s future behaviour. These provide a comical catalogue of what members of the Globe audience will have recognized as Jonson’s characteristic public habits. Here are just a few: you shall not sit in a Gallery, when your Comedies and Enterludes have entred their Actions, and there make vile and bad faces at everie lyne . . . you must forsweare to venter on the stage, when your Play is ended, and to exchange curtezies and complements with Gallants in the Lordes roomes . . . when your Playes are misse-likt at Court, you shall not crye Mew like a Pusse-cat, and say you are glad you write out of the Courtiers Element . . . when you Sup in Tavernes, amongst your betters, you shall sweare not to dippe your Manners in too much sawce, nor at Table to fling Epigrams, Embleames, or Playe-speeches about you (lyke Hayle-stones) . . . (Satiromastix 5.2.298–334)

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Rather than endure a whipping, Horace agrees to all of these conditions, and falls silent. In The Merry Wives Falstaff, once humbled through punishment, is incorporated into the comedy’s closing merry-making. Master Page invites him to ‘eat a posset’ at his house that evening (5.5.168). Horace/Jonson enjoys no such feast. Even the ‘Epilogus’ (Jonson-like in its Latinate title) offers no comfort. Captain Tucca, who delivers it, invites the audience to applaud in order to prolong Horace’s disgrace.32 If they praise the play, ‘Horace will write against it’ – but ‘my Poetasters will not laugh at him, but will untrusse him agen, and agen, and agen’ – an entertaining prospect for playgoers well pleased by Satiromastix. For Jonson himself the threat of relentless pursuit must have been especially crushing on the occasion when Satiromastix was performed ‘publikely’ by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the very same players who had performed his own ‘Humours’ comedies. Shakespeare himself had taken a leading role in Every Man In. This fact should be borne in mind when considering the likelihood that he also played a major role in Satiromastix. When Satiromastix was printed, only a few weeks later, probably from Dekker’s foul papers, the spectacle of Jonson’s humiliation reached an even wider public. The interest the play provoked is confirmed by Edward Pudsey’s rather full notes on it. He refers to the play as ‘untruss: of the Poet’, which may perhaps have been the title under which it was performed. However, what appealed to him most for ‘commonplacing’ purposes were the set speeches for and against baldness, rather than the play’s closing scene, from which he made no extracts.33 Bad feeling between Dekker and Jonson persisted. For instance, they were at odds over their respective contributions to celebrations of James I’s accession. With characteristic speed, Dekker composed a pageant for James’s first entry into London in May 1603, but this was ‘layd by’ unperformed. He seems later to have incorporated parts of it into the Magnificent Entertainment that he wrote for James’s ceremonial progress through the City of London on 15 March 1604. Anne Lancashire suggests that

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Dekker ‘resented having to change his female Genius to a male to conform to Jonson’s Genius in his Fenchurch pageant’,34 and Richard Dutton concludes that ‘Jonson and Dekker simply did not get on with each other . . . [their] antagonism seems to have been genuine, not merely assumed for the benefit of the public. Years later Jonson was to call Dekker a “rogue” (Drummond)’.35 Jonson and Shakespeare, on the other hand, were presumably in some sense reconciled by the time that the latter performed a leading role in the former’s Sejanus his Fall in the winter of 1603. This record also provides yet more evidence that Shakespeare continued to act as well as to write. In Satiromastix I suspect that his authoritative Sir Vaughan confronted Richard Burbage’s overweening Horace (Jonson), whereas in Jonson’s own Roman tragedy Shakespeare’s Emperor Tiberius confronted Burbage’s high-aspiring Sejanus. Jonson and Marston also seem to have made up their differences. In 1604 Marston dedicated the printed text of The Malcontent to Jonson in terms of cordial admiration, and in 1605 they collaborated, together with Chapman, on the satirical comedy Eastward Ho!. Jonson did not refrain from further gibes at Shakespeare’s writing. By the time Jonson commented on him to William Drummond Shakespeare had been dead for three years. However, he was still alive when Jonson wrote Bartholomew Fair, performed at the Hope theatre on 31 October 1614 and at court the following day (‘Hallowmas’). If he witnessed one of these performances Shakespeare could scarcely have taken pleasure in the play’s Induction, with its scornful references both to his earliest work and his most recent. The Scrivener, drawing up articles of agreement between the audience and the author, mocks the oldfashioned taste of those who, thirty years on, continue to ‘sweare, Jeronimo, or Andronicus are the best playes’. By coupling Titus Andronicus with Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587) Jonson makes Shakespeare’s early co-written melodrama sound even more antique than it was. Far more hurtful, however – for writers always want their most recent works to be praised – were the rhetorical questions that follow a little later:

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If there bee never a Servant-monster i’the Fayre; who can helpe it? he sayes; nor a nest of Antiques? Hee is loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries, to mixe his head with other mens heeles, let the concupiscence of Jigges and Dances, raigne as strong as it will amongst you.36 But by the time Bartholomew Fair appeared in print, in Jonson’s 1616 Workes, the author of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale had just died. When preparing his own texts for the press Jonson could not have anticipated that Shakespeare would die so soon. In the light of his death, he may have felt some remorse both about those dismissive comments on Caliban (‘Servant-monster’) and about his more sweeping allusions to the fantastically magical and generically confused Winter’s Tale and Tempest. His 1616 Folio collection included further apparent sallies against Shakespeare’s writings. For instance, the dedication of his own Epigrammes to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, opens with what appear to be sharp attacks on Shakespeare for having been over-familiar with the young Earl in permitting the dedication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to ‘Master W.H.’. Unlike some other writer – apparently Shakespeare in the 1609 Sonnets – Jonson addresses Pembroke by his correct title and expresses himself with full candour, since, when he wrote his epigrams, ‘I had nothing in my conscience, to expressing of which I did need a cypher.’37 However, if Jonson was embarrassed about the appearance in print of various digs against Shakespeare’s writings in his folio Workes so soon after the Midlander’s death that same year, he made handsome amends in his contributions to Shakespeare’s own Folio, posthumously edited by Heminge and Condell and published in 1623. His elegy on him, amply entitled ‘To the memory of my beloved, The AUTHOR, Master William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us’, reflects a period when memories of the man were still green, but theatrical culture appeared to be in decline. Elsewhere, however, Jonson declared that while he felt personal affection for Shakespeare ‘the man’, he had deep reservations about

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his writings, which he viewed as facile, careless and unlearned. He felt that they were over-valued by his loyal but unscholarly colleagues. This position was clarified in Discoveries, his late reflections ‘UPON MEN AND MATTER’: I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, Woulde he had blotted a thousand . . . And to justifie mine owne candor, (for I lov’d the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any.) Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d . . . His wit was in his owne power; would the rule of it had beene so too.38 This appears to be his final verdict, much at odds with that of posterity, which has endorsed his earlier celebration of Shakespeare as a ‘Sweet Swan’.

ii. sweet swan The second, apparently final, draft of Shakespeare’s will survives in the National Archives. It is the least ‘sweet’ composition to which the poet ever gave his name, even if we take Troilus and Cressida and the co-written Timon of Athens into consideration. As E.A.J. Honigmann has remarked, omitted names, and names struck out in revision, betray ‘many signs . . . of anger and disappointment’.39 No further documents relating to Shakespeare’s death and its immediate aftermath have reached us. There should originally have been inventories of his possessions, and directions both for his funeral and interment and for his physical memorial, the wall-monument carved in Southwark but erected, some time before 1623, in Holy Trinity, Stratford. Such directions should have been delivered, either orally or in writing, to Francis Collins

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and Thomas Russell, as overseers of the will, and/or to Dr John Hall, the poet’s son-in-law. Perhaps these documents were among the ‘Divers bookes boxes Deskes, moneyes bonds bills and other goods of great value’ that were seized by Stratford bailiffs from the ‘study’ in New Place in February 1637, after the death of John Hall. A Stratford mercer called Baldwin Brooks – later the town’s Bailiff/Lord Mayor – claimed that at the time of his death on 22 November 1635 John Hall owed him the substantial sum of £77 13s. 4d. The debt had not been settled by Hall’s heirs, apparently because Hall’s will had been neither proved nor administered. Brooks accused Susanna Hall, together with her daughter Elizabeth and her son-in-law Thomas Nash, of either concealing or faking – ‘antedating’ – records of properties formerly belonging to John Hall.40 According to Susanna Hall the material removed by the bailiffs was of ‘the valewe of one Thowsand poundes att the least’, and was promptly sold off by Brooks without being either inventoried or valued. Susanna herself admitted that her estimate was rough, ‘for that the same are not as yet appraised or Inventoried’.41 Levi Fox suggests that £1,000 is ‘a palpable exaggeration’, and it may well be very approximate, especially since it does appear to be the case that no proper inventories were made either before or immediately after John Hall’s death.42 Obviously Susanna and her allies hoped to convict Brooks of having seized goods far in excess of the money owed to him. But since Susanna, at least, was not fully literate – she was apparently unable to recognize her late husband’s handwriting43 – she may not have been best qualified to assess the value of the material in the study. Half a dozen records of proceedings in Chancery relating to Susanna Hall’s dispute with Brooks have been usefully edited by Frank Marcham. Yet the whole episode remains deeply mysterious. We simply do not know what sort of material was contained in those ‘boxes’ and ‘Deskes’. A ‘desk’ could be a repository both for papers and for valuables, as in the instructions given by Antipholus of Ephesus to Dromio of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors:

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To Adriana, villain, hie thee straight: Give her this key, and tell her in the desk That’s cover’d o’er with Turkish tapestry, There is a purse of ducats. (4.1.103–6) It is possible that the ‘boxes’ and ‘Deskes’ in New Place contained, in addition to valuables and legal deeds, personal and/or literary papers inherited from Dr John Hall’s celebrated fatherin-law. However, no items traceable to this source seem ever to have surfaced. A solitary literary text relates to the immediate aftermath of Shakespeare’s death. This is William Basse’s sixteen-line poem in rhyming couplets, which circulated widely in manuscript under his name in the 1620s. It was also, wrongly, included among the poems of John Donne published by John Donne Junior in 1633.44 William Browne the pastoralist, a friend of Basse’s and a protégé of the Earl of Pembroke, included Basse’s epitaph in a poetical miscellany written in his own hand.45 This is likely to be one of the most reliable versions, textually, and was chosen as such by Chambers.46 It bears the title ‘On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare he dyed in Aprill 1616’. The poem was composed immediately after news of Shakespeare’s death reached Basse, for he evidently assumed that the poet had died in London, and was to be interred in Westminster Abbey near to Francis Beaumont, Edmund Spenser and Geoffrey Chaucer. Beaumont, a personal friend of Basse’s, died on 6 March 1616, and was interred in the Abbey on 9 March.47 Spenser had been buried there on 16 January 1599, at the expense of the Earl of Essex. Though Chaucer died in 1400, it was not until 1556 that the Tudor antiquary Nicholas Brigham undertook to have a monument to him erected in the east aisle of the transept – the area now known as Poets’ Corner. At the time of Basse’s poem, however, this was simply Chaucer’s Corner, for neither Spenser nor Beaumont yet had monuments. The governing conceit of Basse’s poem is that three poets buried close to each other in the Abbey share a bed, and must now

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move along and bunch up in order to ‘make roome / For Shakespeare in your threefold fowerfold Tombe’. This verges on the ridiculous. But as if correcting his own grotesque play of fancy, Basse then proposes that Shakespeare should, instead, rest ‘Under this carved marble of thine owne’. Perhaps Basse hoped that his promptly written lines would be inscribed on a ‘marble’ monument to Shakespeare in the Abbey. It was not to be. As the title of another manuscript text of Basse’s poem stated, Shakespeare ‘was bury’d att Stratford upon Avon, his Town of Nativity’.48 His monument, though carved in Gerard Johnson’s Southwark workshop, not far from the second Globe theatre, was erected in the North wall of the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. However, until the appearance of the First Folio in 1623 Basse’s poem held the field as Shakespeare’s chief written memorial. The ensuing lines in the poem deserve attention: Sleepe rare Tragoedian Shakespeare, sleep alone, Thy unmolested peace, unshared Cave, Possesse as Lord not Tenant of thy Grave. The phrase on which I want to focus is ‘rare Tragoedian’. Basse’s line is cited by OED (from the very poor text included in Donne’s 1633 Poems) in support of the dictionary’s first definition of the word as ‘A dramatist who composes a tragedy or tragedies; a tragic poet or author’. However, OED’s sense 2, that of ‘A stageplayer who performs in a tragedy; a tragic actor’ is far more powerfully exemplified from the Elizabethan period – from Nashe (‘The Tragedian that represents his person’); from Marston (‘I will not swell like a Tragedian’); and, most tellingly of all, from Shakespeare’s own Hamlet, when Rosencrantz announces the arrival in Elsinore of ‘the tragedians of the city’ in whom the Prince is known to delight (2.2.292). The Arden editors of Hamlet rightly note that the word here denotes ‘actors (not exclusively of tragedies)’. Shakespeare used the word twice more, and in both cases it again denotes a performer, not a playwright. In the opening lines of Act 3, scene 5, of Richard III Richard interrogates Buckingham about his acting skills:

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Come, cousin, canst thou quake and change thy colour, Murder thy breath in middle of a word, And then again begin, and stop again, As if thou were distraught and mad with terror? – to which Buckingham confidently responds, ‘Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian’. It is clear that the word here alludes to histrionic skills, not literary ones. The third occurrence is in All’s Well that Ends Well. Parolles pours scorn on the soldiership of Count Bertram, who is – like Parolles himself – a mere playersoldier, with no true battlefield experience: ‘Faith, sir, has led the drum before the English tragedians – to belie him I will not – and more of his soldiership I know not’ (AW 4.3.257–9). As in the Hamlet example, ‘tragedians’ are members of a playing company, which may, like the ‘tragedians of the city’ heralded by Polonius, be accomplished in a wide variety of theatrical genres. In praising Shakespeare as a ‘rare Tragoedian’ Basse distinguishes him from Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont. All four were major poets, and Beaumont, like Shakespeare, wrote for the theatre. But Shakespeare alone was also a performer. Anti-theatrical prejudice, commonplace among nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars, has led both to a misreading of Basse’s poem and to a misleading citation of it in OED. In bidding Shakespeare ‘sleep alone’ Basse highlights his admiration for his unique, or ‘rare’, combination of gifts. All four men were major poets, but Shakespeare alone could also bring poetry to immediate life by performing it on the stage. This intensified the loss represented by his death. Some of his plays could still be read at the time when Basse was writing – about half were in print – but no one would ever again be able to see and hear him ‘shake a stage’. Ripples of this immediate loss to playgoers can be detected in some of the poems prefaced to the First Folio. Ralegh’s widely circulated verses beginning ‘What is our life? A play of passion’ had given epigrammatic currency to the notion of the world as a theatre and life as a player’s brief part. But when applied to a man who had himself been a prominent player this

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imagery acquires more literal force. Hugh Holland laments Shakespeare’s departure ‘to the grave / (Deaths publique tyringhouse)’, and James Mabbe marvels at his precipitate exit ‘From the Worlds-Stage, to the Graves-Tyring-roome’, linking the eventual appearance of the Folio to an actor’s ‘Re-entrance to a Plaudite’. Most notably, Shakespeare’s name heads the list of the ‘Principall Actors in all these plays’, which seems to be arranged in order of seniority (see above, p. 34). There was no need for the editors of the Folio to award Shakespeare the first place here – above even Burbage. His achievement in having written the plays that ensue was sufficiently powerful without such testimony to his additional pre-eminence as a player. To me, his prime placement suggests that Shakespeare was not a supporting or occasional actor, nor one who at some point abandoned acting for writing. He played major roles throughout his life. If the claim was excessive, there were plenty of readers in 1623 who would have been aware of it. The opening text in the Folio is The Tempest, Shakespeare’s final single-authored play, and manifestly valedictory in tone. The most recent Arden editors remark that its ‘pride of place’, which was part of the editors’ plan from the outset, is ‘one of the book’s minor mysteries’.49 However, once we take account of Shakespeare’s continued activity as a player, it makes perfect sense. Immediate encounter with The Tempest served to remind readers in 1623 of Shakespeare’s last prominent appearances on stage, as a great practitioner of white magic who feels himself to be near the end both of his powers and his life. Many courtiers, including the two Herbert brothers to whom the Folio is dedicated, would remember having seen him in the play only a decade earlier, when it was performed at court in the winter of 1612–13 as part of the celebration of the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. The play’s ‘EPILOGUE’, spoken by a humbled Prospero who has now discarded his magus’s robe, offers a simple summary of the speaker’s ‘project’ both as writer and performer: it ‘was to please’. Shakespeare’s unrivalled success in ‘pleasing’ is manifest in the lively responses of readers and audiences in the next four

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centuries. As in Shakespeare’s lifetime, there have regularly been individuals who have wanted to knock the player-poet off his pedestal. As in his lifetime, also, at various times certain works have been more in demand than others. Venus and Adonis, for instance, so much admired throughout the 1590s, has never received its full due in modern times. Yet at any given moment in the last four hundred years there has been a sufficient body of works found both enjoyable and deeply thought-provoking to ensure that the ‘Sweet Swan’ who took flight from the Avon to the Thames has continued to be airborne.

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APPENDIX peacham’s extracts from ‘titus andronicus’ Enter Tamora pleadinge for her sonnes going to execution Tam:

Titus:

Aron:

Stay Romane bretheren gratious Conquerors Victorious Titus rue the teares I shed A mothers teares in passion of her sonnes And if thy sonnes were ever deare to thee Oh thinke my sonnes to bee as deare to mee Suffizeth not that wee are brought to Roome To beautify thy triumphes and returne Captiue to thee and to thy Romane yoake But must my sonnes be slaughtered in the streetes for valiant doings in there Cuntryes cause Oh if to fight for kinge and common weale Were piety in thine it is in these Andronicus staine not thy tombe with blood Wilt thou draw neere the nature of the Godes Drawe neere them then in being mercifull Sweete mercy is nobilityes true badge Thrice noble Titus spare my first borne sonne Patient your self madame for dy hee must Aaron do you likewise prepare your selfe And now at last repent your wicked life Ah now I curse the day and yet I thinke Few comes within the compasse of you my curse Wherein I did not some notorious ill As kill a man or els devise his death Ravish a maid or plott the way to do it, Acuse some innocent and forsweare myself Set deadly enmity betweene too frendes Make poore mens cattell breake theire neckes Set fire on barnes and haystackes in the night And bid the owners quench them with their teares Oft have I digd up dead men from their graves And set them upright at their deere frendes dore Even almost when theire sorrowes was forgott And on their brestes as on the barke of trees

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

262

Appendix Have with my knife carvd in Romane letters Lett not your sorrowe dy though I am dead Tut I have done a thousand dreadfull thinges As willingly as one would kill a fly And nothing greives mee hartily indeede For that I cannot doo ten thousand more & &

Alarbus

40

ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES journals and works of reference APC

Acts of the Privy Council

Arber

Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 5 vols (London and Birmingham, 1875–94)

BLR

Bodleian Library Record

CSP

Calendar of State Papers

ET

Early Theatre

HMC

Historical Manuscripts Commission

IGI

International Genealogical Index

MP

Modern Philology

N&Q

Notes and Queries

OED

The Oxford English Dictionary

ODNB

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004)

REED

Records of Early English Drama

RES

Review of English Studies

SQ

Shakespeare Quarterly

SS

Shakespeare Survey

Tilley, Proverbs Morris P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1950) TLS

Times Literary Supplement

TxC

Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987)

264

Abbreviations and References

books and articles Bednarz James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare & the Poets’ War (New York, 2001) Chambers, Stage E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford, 1923) Chambers, WS E.K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford, 1930) Chapman, Poems The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York and London, 1941) Chaucer The Riverside Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, rev. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, 1988) Chettle, Garment Henry Chettle, Englandes mourning garment worne by plain shepherds in memory of their sacred mistress, Elizabeth; queen of virtue while she lived, and theme of sorrow being dead (1603) Drayton The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J.W. Hebel et al. 5 vols (Oxford, 1961) Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life (London, 2010) Eccles Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison, Wisconsin, 1961) Greene, Groatsworth Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance, ed. D. Allen Carroll (Binghamton, NY, 1994) Gurr, Companies Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford, 1996) Gurr, Company Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642 (Cambridge, 2006) Hackett, Myths Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton and Oxford, 2009) Hammer Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of February 1601, and the Essex Rising’, SQ 59 (2008), 1–35 Henslowe R.A. Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2002) Henslowe, Companion Neil Carson, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge, 1988) Honigmann, ‘Bed’ E.A.J. Honigmann, ‘The second-best bed’, New York Review of Books (7 November 1991)

Abbreviations and References

265

Honigmann, Impact E.A.J. Honigmann, Shakespeare’s Impact on his Contemporaries (London, 1982) Honigmann, Lost Years E.A.J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The Lost Years (Manchester, 1985) Honigmann, Weever E.A.J. Honigmann, John Weever: A Biography of a literary associate of Shakespeare and Jonson, together with a photographic facsimile of Wevver’s Epigrammes (1599) (Manchester, 1987) Hotson, Sonnets Dated Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated and other essays (London, 1949) Hoy, Dekker Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes and Commentaries to texts in ‘The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker’ edited by Fredson Bowers, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1979–80) Jackson, ‘Meres’ MacD.P. Jackson, ‘Francis Meres and the cultural contexts of Shakespeare’s Rival Poet sonnets’, RES n.s. 56 (2005), 224–46 Jackson, ‘Vocabulary and Chronology’ MacD.P. Jackson, ‘Vocabulary and Chronology: The Case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, RES n.s. 52 (2001), 59–75 Jones, Butchers Philip E. Jones, The Butchers of London: A history of the Worshipful Company of Butchers of the City of London (London, 1976) Jonson Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925–52) Jonson, Poetaster Poetaster: Ben Jonson, ed. Tom Cain (Manchester, 1995) Jowett, ‘Chettle, Compositor’ John Jowett, ‘Henry Chettle: “Your Old Compositor” ’, Text 15 (2002/3), 141–61 Jowett, ‘Chettle and More’ John Jowett, ‘Henry Chettle and the original text of Thomas More’, in T.H. Howard-Hill (ed.), Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the play and its Shakespearian interest (Cambridge, 1989), 131–49 Jowett, ‘Factotum’ ‘Johannes Factotum: Henry Chettle and Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit’, Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 87 (1993), 453–86 Langham, Letter Robert Langham: A Letter, ed. R.J.P. Kuin (Leiden, 1983) Marlowe, Poems Christopher Marlowe: The Poems, ed. Millar Maclure (London, 1968) Meres Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury (1598), Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 2nd printing (New York, 1978)

266

Abbreviations and References

Murphy, Shakespeare in Print Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge, 2003) Nashe The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R.B. McKerrow, rev. F.P. Wilson, 5 vols (Oxford, 1958) Nicholls, ‘Percy’ Mark Nicholls, ‘Sir Charles Percy’, Recusant History 18.3 (1987), 237–50 Parnassus Plays J.B. Leishman (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601) (Cambridge, 1949) Puttenham The Arte of English Poesie by George Puttenham, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936) Ratseis Ghost H.B. Charlton (ed.), Ratseis Ghost, or the Second Part of his madde Prankes and Robberies [1605] (Manchester, 1932) Rees, ‘Pudseys Booke’ Juliet Rees, ‘Shakespeare and “Edward Pudseys Booke” 1600’, N&Q 237 (1992), 30–31 Schoenbaum, Documentary S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (New York, 1975) Shakespeare, Poems Shakespeare’s Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and the Shorter Poems, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen (Arden Shakespeare, 2007) Sidney, Defence Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, 1973) Smith, Republica Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1587) Spenser, Shorter Poems William A. Oram et al. (eds), Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven and London, 1989) Tucker, Assignment of Arms Stephen Tucker, The Assignment of Arms to Shakespeare and Arden 1596–1599 (London, 1884) Weever, Faunus Faunus and Melliflora (1600) by John Weever, ed. Arnold Davenport (London, 1934) Wiles, Shakespeare’s Almanac David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Almanac: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Marriage and the Elizabethan Calendar (Cambridge, 1993)

NOTES prologue: kill-cow 1. V.B. Heltzel and H.H. Hudson (eds), Nobilis, or a View of the Life and Death of a Sidney . . . by Thomas Moffett (San Marino, California, 1940), 70–71. 2. Quoted in Schoenbaum, Documentary, 58. 3. Robert Bearman, ‘ “Mr Dowdall” revealed’, N&Q 47.2 (June 2000), 188–9. 4. Chambers, WS, 2.259; Dowdall’s letter is reproduced in Schoenbaum, Documentary, 262. 5. Eccles, 125. 6. Douglas Hamer, review of Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, RES n.s. 22 (1971), 482–5. 7. E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford, 1903), 2.217. 8. The parable of the Prodigal Son is mentioned by Shakespeare at least eight times in all; see Richmond Noble, Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge (New York, 1935), 277. 9. R.A. Foakes (ed.), The Comedy of Errors (Arden Shakespeare, 1962), 74. 10. BL MS Harley 6848, fo. 154; reproduced in W.W. Greg, English Literary Autographs 1550–1650 (Oxford, 1925–32), XV(b). 11. See Giorgio Melchiori (ed.), The Merry Wives of Windsor (Arden Shakespeare, 2000), 21 for an argument that Falstaff became a ‘Poor Knight of Windsor’. His former hostess and friend Mistress Quickly is reduced to being a housekeeper for Dr Caius. 12. Eccles, 48, 26. 13. Quoted in Richard Ollard, A Man of Contradictions: A Life of A.L. Rowse (London, 1999), 283. 14. J.B. Short, The Butcher’s Shop: A Study of a Country Butcher’s Business (Oxford, 1928), 11. 15. R.W. Ingram (ed.), REED: Coventry (Manchester, 1981), 193, 216, 219–68. 16. Bodleian MS Top. Warwickshire c.7, fo. 16. 17. L.M. Clopper (ed.), REED: Chester (Manchester, 1979), 32. 18. Clifford Davidson, ‘York Guild and the Corpus Christi Plays: Unwilling Participants?’, ET 9.2 (2006), 11–33. 19. Alan D. Justice, ‘Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle’, Theatre Journal 31.1 (March 1979), 47–58. 20. Ibid., 57. 21. Ibid.

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Notes to Prologue

22. KJ 3.3.79; 1H6 1.3.39; R2 5.6.43; LLL 4.2.34; 2H4 1.1.157; MW 1.4.21; Ham 5.1.73. An EEBO search suggests that no other playwright of the period made anything like so many. 23. J.A.B. Somerset (ed.), REED: Shropshire (Toronto, 1994), 501f. 24. C. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979), 281 and passim. 25. Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (Oxford, 2007), 37. 26. Langham, Letter, 52–3. 27. Ibid. 28. Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (London, 2005), 44. 29. Ibid., 55. 30. BL Royal MS 10.E.IV, fo. 294v. 31. V.B. Richmond, The Legend of Guy of Warwick (New York and London, 1996), 97–9. 32. Drayton, 4.283–4; Song XIII, lines 311–13; 344–5. 33. Helen Cooper, ‘Guy of Warwick, Upstart Crows and Mounting Sparrows’ in Takashi Kozuka and J.R. Mulryne (eds), Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography (Aldershot, 2006), 119–38. 34. See Helen D. Moore (ed.), Guy of Warwick, 1661, Malone Society Reprints 170 (Manchester, 2007), 5. 35. OED, ‘kill-cow’, n. and a.1. 36. Nashe, 3.311–12. 37. For accounts of Leicester’s and Warwick’s players, see Gurr, Companies, 185–9; 171–4. 38. Steven Doloff, ‘Killed behind the Curtain: More on Hamlet’s Calf Allusion’, N&Q 254.4 (December 2009), 583. 39. Honigmann, Impact, 79–80; L.A. Beaurline (ed.), King John (Cambridge, 1990), 210. 40. A.R. Braunmuller (ed.), The Life and Death of King John (Oxford, 1989), 134. 41. Cf. Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Shakespeare, Guy of Warwick, and chines of beef ’, N&Q 254.1 (March 2009), 70–72. 42. Quoted in Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth, 1984), 293. 43. I. Archer, C. Barron and V. Harding (eds), Hugh Alley’s Caveat: The Markets of London in 1598, London Topographical Society Publication 137 (London, 1988), 57. 44. C.L. Kingsford (ed.), John Stow: A Survey of London (repr. Oxford, 1971), 1.316–17. 45. Jones, Butchers, 141. 46. For a valuable discussion of the importance of butchery in the Henry VI cycle, see Ronald Knowles (ed.), 2 Henry VI (Arden Shakespeare, 1999), 99–100.

Notes to Chapter 1

269

47. Jones, Butchers, 148. 48. Schoenbaum, Documentary, 58–9. 49. Robert Bearman, personal communication; IGI.

1: upstart crow 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Greene, Groatsworth, 84–5. Ibid., 85. Schoenbaum, Documentary, 136. Nashe, 3.89–90. W.E. Buckley (ed.), Cephalus and Procris, Narcissus. By Thomas Edwards (Roxburghe Club: London, 1882), 62. Spenser, Shorter Poems, 75. Nashe, 1.82–3. Schoenbaum, Documentary, 171 (where Brooke’s first name is given wrongly as ‘Peter’). See Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Shakespeare among the Heralds’, The Coat of Arms n.s. 13 (2000), 317–30. Anthony Munday (?), A second and third blast of retraite from theatres (1580) 121–2. An expanded version of the pamphlet was published as A knights Conjuring, Done in earnest: discovered in jest the following year. In an appended closing section various recently dead poets, including Nashe and Chettle, are described arriving in Elysium. Thirteen pence and a halfpenny. Thomas Dekker, Newes from Hell (1606), sigs H1r–v. Eccles, 82. Chambers, Stage, 1.310. Jonson, 3.403; 4.471. Peter Holland, ‘An unplucked heart’, TLS, 28 October 2005, 24–5. Aubrey’s whole account is reproduced in facsimile in Schoenbaum, Documentary, 58. See Andrew Gurr, ‘Beeston [Hutchinson], Christopher (1579/80–1638), actor and theatre impresario’, ODNB. Schoenbaum, Documentary, 148–9. Peter Holland, ‘Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), playwright and poet’, ODNB. The passage occurs in William Camden, Britannia (1590), 452–3. It was translated thus by Camden’s friend Richard Knolles: ‘Stratford . . . oweth all the honour thereof unto two her foster children, viz. to John of Stratford, Archbishop of Canterbury, and to Hugh Clopton. Maior of London, who not without great chardges, made a stone Bridge of fourteen Arches over Avon’ (Bodleian MS Ashmole 849, p. 6443).

270

Notes to Chapter 1

23. Alan H. Nelson and Paul H. Altrocchi, ‘William Shakespeare, “Our Roscius” ’, SQ 60.4 (2009), 460–69. 24. Jowett, ‘Factotum’. 25. Nashe, 3.311–12, 315–16. 26. Cf. Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Did the Boy Shakespeare Kill Calves?’, RES 55.219 (2004), 183–95. 27. This closely echoes Nashe’s 1589 attack on newly arrived unlearned poets ‘who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) thinke to out-brave better pennes with the swelling bumbast of bragging blanke verse’ (Nashe, 3.311). 28. John Dover Wilson, ‘Malone and the Upstart Crow’, SS 4 (1951), 56–68. 29. Tilley, Proverbs, C852; the earliest example is found in the play The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1589). 30. Henslowe, 83. 31. D. Allen Carroll, ‘Johannes Factotum and Jack Cade’, SQ 40.4 (1989), 493–4. 32. I.M.W. Harvey, ‘Cade, John [Jack; alias John Mortimer; called the Captain of Kent] (d. 1450), rebel leader’, ODNB. 33. Anon., The defence of Cunny catching (1592; entered in the Stationers’ Register 21 April 1592). 34. Wilson, ‘Malone and the Upstart Crow’, 3. 35. See Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Who was Marlowe’s “brocher of Atheisme?”’, N&Q 25.4 (2006), 449–52. 36. Tilley, Proverbs, 340; cf. TN 3.4.351–4. 37. Jowett, ‘Factotum’, 471. 38. See Greene, Groatsworth, 18. 39. Nashe, 1.154; for a discussion of the date of this epistle see Nashe, 3.78–9. 40. There was an itinerant tooth-drawer known as ‘Kind-Hart’; Chettle presumably suggests that, like a tooth-drawer, he inflicts pain on people for their own good. 41. ‘Approoves’: proves, demonstrates. 42. Chambers, Stage, 1.308f. 43. Ibid., 4.348–9. 44. See Charles Nicholl, ‘Nashe [Nash], Thomas (bap. 1567, d. c. 1601)’, ODNB; see also Nashe, 5.62–3 (F.P. Wilson’s additions). 45. Sir George Paule, The life of the most reverend and religious prelate John Whitgift, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (1612), 78. 46. APC (1592–3), 210–43. 47. Ibid., 212. 48. The exact date of Nashe’s death is unknown; he was certainly dead by the summer of 1601, when a Latin epitaph on him was included in Charles Fitzgeffrey’s Affaniae, sig. N3r. 49. Nashe, 4.428–31. 50. Nashe, 3.132. 51. Nashe, 4.419. 52. Nashe, 3.236.

Notes to Chapter 2 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64.

271

Thomas Churchyard, Churchyards good will (1604), sig. B2r. Paule, John Whitgift, 77. Ibid., 79. Cf. Nicholl, ‘Nashe [Nash], Thomas’; the passage occurs in BL Lansdowne MS 107, fo. 52r. Nashe, 3.240. J.J.M. Tobin, ‘Nashe and Julius Caesar’, N&Q 32.4 (1985), 473–4. H.R. Woudhuysen (ed.), Love’s Labour’s Lost (Arden Shakespeare, 1998), 294–5. A possible period when such a play, showing English valour in battles against the French, might have been urgently required is either the spring or summer of 1591. English forces led by Sir Roger Williams were sent to Northern France to support Henri IV in March and a larger force, led by the young Earl of Essex, in August. Brian Vickers, ‘Incomplete Shakespeare: Or, Denying Coauthorship in 1 Henry VI’, SQ 58.3 (2007), 335–6. W.W. Greg, A Companion to Arber (Oxford, 1967), 44. W.W. Greg, Licensers for the Press (Oxford, 1962), 19–20. Whitgift’s continued patronage of Nashe may be suggested in the fact that he personally licensed his Pierce Penilesse on 8 August 1592, his Christes teares on 8 September 1593, and his Unfortunate Traveller on 17 September 1593. Cf. Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Shakespeare’s Status Anxiety’, TLS, 11 April 2006.

2: three early readers 1. I am chiefly concerned here to discuss the likelihood that Peacham made a record from a performance of Titus Andronicus that he saw and heard, and to argue that he deliberately shaped this record in order to give it exemplary coherence. I have therefore not explored issues of the date, integrity and authenticity of the document, which some scholars have claimed is the work of two different hands at widely divergent dates. However, my own belief is that drawing, text, name and date were all done by Henry Peacham the younger in 1594 or 1595. 2. E.K. Chambers, ‘The First Illustration to “Shakespeare” ’, The Library 5 (1925), 330. 3. For an excellent account of the development of such training in Renaissance Europe, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996), especially chapter 6, ‘Common-place books at school’. 4. See David Kathman, ‘Pudsey, Edward (bap. 1573, d. 1612/13), keeper of a commonplace book’, ODNB.

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5. From Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office MS ER 82/1/2; also quoted in Rees, ‘Pudseys Booke’, 330–31, and in E.A.J. Honigmann (ed.), Othello (Arden Shakespeare, 1996), 389. 6. Alan Hughes (ed.), Titus Andronicus (Cambridge, 1994) 15–21. 7. The manuscripts are, in chronological order: Bodleian Rawlinson MS poet. 146; BL Harley MS 6855, item 13; BL Royal MS 12A lxvi (this last especially splendid and beautifully coloured). 8. John Horden, ‘Peacham, Henry (b. 1587, d. in or after 1644), writer and illustrator’, ODNB. 9. Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford, 2002), 148–243. 10. Gustav Ungerer, ‘An unrecorded performance of Titus Andronicus’, SS 14 (1961), 102–9. 11. Horden, ‘Peacham’, ODNB. 12. Henry Peacham, The Truth of our Times (1638), 90–91. 13. See Jonson, 10.453–7. 14. Peacham, The Truth of our Times, 103–5. 15. Robert Willis, Mount Tabor (1639), 110–14. 16. Henry Peacham, The more the merrier (1608), sig. A3r. 17. Nashe, 1.188. 18. Henry Peacham, Thalia’s banquet (1620), Epigram 94. 19. Peacham, A pleasant dispute between Coach and Sedan (1636), sig. E2r. 20. Ibid., sig. E2r. 21. Ibid., sig. C4v. 22. Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (1622), 27. 23. Ibid., 107. 24. Peacham, Thalia’s Banquet, Epigram 70. 25. Henry Peacham, The Gentleman’s Exercise (1612), 15. 26. See H.R. Woudhuysen, ‘Writing Tables and Table-Books’, Electronic British Library Journal (2004), Article 3. 27. Bodleian MS Eng. poet. d.3, fo. 81r. 28. See Jonathan Bate (ed.), Titus Andronicus (Arden Shakespeare, 1995), 104–7. 29. Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, 2.3.195–7, in Fredson Bowers (ed.), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, 1973), 1.291. 30. But see a useful article by Juliet Gowan, ‘“One Man in his Time”: the Notebook of Edward Pudsey’, BLR, 22.1 (April 2009), 94–101. 31. Kathman, ‘Pudsey’, ODNB. 32. They are quoted and discussed in Honigmann (ed.), Othello, Appendix 4, 388–9. 33. See D.J. Lake, ‘Histriomastix: Linguistic Evidence for Authorship’, N&Q 226 (1981), 150. 34. See E.A.B. Barnard and L.F. Newman, ‘John Deighton of Gloucester, Surgeon’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 64 (1943), 71–88.

Notes to Chapter 2 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

273

Honigmann (ed.), Othello, 388. Nashe, 2.179. Cf. R3 1.1.98–100. Cf. R3 1.2.174–5. Cf. R3 3.7.184–5. Nashe, 1.230–31. Nashe, 3.246. Nashe, 3.253–4. Richard Savage, Shakespearean Extracts (Stratford, 1888), 40 reads Pudsey’s phrase, nonsensically, as ‘. . . & found Frist between the sheete’. He failed to see that Pudsey has used his italic hand to write the letters ‘E’ and ‘H’ with the ampersand (‘&’) between them. For a full and illuminating discussion of quotations from Hamlet in printed texts, see Sayre N. Greenfield, ‘Quoting Hamlet in the Early Seventeenth Century’, MP 105 (2008), 510–34. Cf. Ham 3.1.142–5. Cf. Ham 1.2.143–5. Cf. Ham 3.4.66–8. Cf. Ham 1.3.58–68. Jonson, 3.21 (Every Man In his Humour 1.3.134–40). 2H4 2.4.160–83 and passim. Grateful thanks to Henry Woudhuysen for this observation. See Rees, ‘Pudseys Booke’. Cf. Ham 5.1.33. Cf. Ham 5.1.132–3. Leslie Hotson first identified Reynolds as a reader of Shakespeare: see Sonnets Dated, 141–7. Quotations from Reynolds are from his autograph letters in BL Lansdowne MS 99, fos 81r–87v. Because his orthography is exceptionally eccentric I have modernized throughout. ‘Master Phillips’ is almost certainly George Phillips (fl. 1579–1600), who was active in London in the 1590s; Stephen Egerton (c. 1555–1622) was parish lecturer in the parish of St Ann, Blackfriars, from about 1586; see the relevant articles in ODNB. HMC Salisbury, 11.93–4. ‘Cheapened a thing’: bought something. It would be interesting to know whether this was a bookshop – but Reynolds does not divulge. Puttenham, 193. Puttenham, 244. Puttenham, 188. That is, Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie and Venus and Adonis. See Shakespeare, Poems, 15, 30. Cf. OED, ‘represent’, v. 10b.

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3: poet and gentleman 1. Muriel Bradbrook, ‘Beasts and Gods: Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte and the social purpose of Venus and Adonis’, SS 15 (1962), 62. 2. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612), sigs a2v–a3r. 3. Nashe, 1.212. 4. Gurr, Companies, 261. 5. The case is powerfully made by Brian Vickers, ‘Incomplete Shakespeare: Or, Denying Coauthorship in 1 Henry VI’, SQ 58.3 (2007), 311–52. It is a pity, however, that he feels the need to be dismissive of the quality of Nashe’s writing. 6. Ibid., 351. 7. Nashe, 1.215. 8. See Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 16. 9. Hotson, Sonnets Dated, 141–7. 10. Drayton, 5.23. 11. For a fuller account, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Much ado with red and white: the earliest readers of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593)’, RES n.s. 44 (1993), 479–501. 12. Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, 17. 13. Nicholas Rowe (ed.), The works of Mr. William Shakespere (1709), 1.x. 14. Robert Bearman, ‘John Shakespeare: a papist or just penniless?’, SQ 56 (2005), 411–33. 15. In The Comedy of Errors, possibly one of his earliest-written plays, Shakespeare showed the arrest of Antipholus by a sergeant for the recovery of a gold chain and money (4.1.1–85), and in 4.3 the sergeant is satirically described by Dromio of Syracuse. 16. Sidney, Defence, 112. 17. Puttenham, 59–60. 18. William Webbe, A discourse of English poetrie Together with the authors judgment, touching the reformation of our English verse (1586), sigs C2v–C3r. 19. BL MS Harley 5807, fo. 98. Smith was also a playwright, and was associated with the King’s Men in the early Jacobean period. 20. See Robert Yorke, ‘Wriothesley [formerly Writhe], Sir Thomas (d. 1534), herald’, ODNB. 21. Reproduced and fully transcribed in Tucker, Assignment of Arms, 6–7. 22. OED ‘merriment’ 2a: ‘a brief, comic, dramatic entertainment. Obs.’ 23. Nashe, 1.213. 24. Tucker, Assignment of Arms, 11. 25. Smith, Republica, 28. 26. Smith, Republica, 29. 27. See, for instance, Stephen Friar, The Sutton Companion to Heraldry (Stroud, 2004), 11. 28. Arber, 3.14.

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29. Greene, Groatsworth, 14, 33. 30. Greene, Groatsworth, 35. 31. See Lukas Erne (ed.), The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge, 2007), 35–6. 32. Ibid., 29–30. 33. Nashe, 3.128. 34. The Parliament of Foules, lines 337–8 (Chaucer, 390). 35. C.W. Scott-Giles, Shakespeare’s Heraldry (London, 1950), 202, 192. 36. Edward I, lines 697–700 (1.96), Charles Tyler Prouty (ed.), The Life and Works of George Peele (New Haven and London, 1952–70). 37. Schoenbaum, Documentary, 186. 38. Ibid., 167. 39. For a fuller discussion, see Duncan-Jones, Ungentle, 110–11. 40. College of Arms Shakespeare Drafts 1; cf. facsimile in Schoenbaum, Documentary, 168. 41. Ralph Brooke’s ‘scroll’ of objections to honours that he alleged had been wrongly awarded by William Dethick and William Camden has not survived, so his precise allegations can only be reconstructed from Dethick and Camden’s ripostes. 42. Bodleian MS Ashmole 856, fo. 50r. 43. Duncan-Jones, Ungentle, 285–6. 44. Schoenbaum, Documentary, 171. 45. BL Harley MS 6140, fo. 46v. 46. See Boris Borukhov, ‘Sir William Segar: Nine Additions to his Biography’, N&Q 252.3 (2007), 328–31. 47. MS Folger V.a.350, p. 28; reproduced in Schoenbaum, Documentary, 172. 48. Quoted in Chambers, Stage, 4.195. 49. See David Kathman, ‘Thomas Heywood (c. 1573–1641), playwright and poet’, ODNB. 50. Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors (1612), sig. E3r. 51. Gail Kern Paster (ed.), Michaelmas Term: Thomas Middleton (Manchester, 2000), 76. 52. Gurr, Company, 51. 53. Jackson, ‘Vocabulary and Chronology’, 75. 54. John Davies, Microcosmos (1603), 215. 55. Ratseis Ghost, sigs A3v–B1r. 56. Ibid., sig. B1v. 57. Honigmann, Impact, 11. 58. Andrew Gurr, ‘A Jibe at Shakespeare in 1606’, N&Q 247 (2002), 245–7; and Gurr, Company, 53–4. 59. Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Drayton, Michael (1563–1631), poet’, ODNB. 60. Chambers, WS, 2.214. 61. Parnassus Plays, 350. 62. See John Anstis, Observations Introductory to an Historical Essay, upon the

276

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Knighthood of the Bath (London, 1725), 53–6. 63. C.H. Herford (ed.), The Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (Gregynog Press: Newtown, Montgomeryshire, 1928), 30.

4: the rival poets 1. G.C. Moore Smith (ed.), Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia (Stratford-uponAvon, 1913), 232. 2. Jackson, ‘Meres’, 232-3. 3. Chapman’s reliance on Comes was first documented by F.L. Schoell; see Chapman, Poems, 422. 4. For a fuller discussion, see Chapman, Poems, 61. 5. Chapman, Poems, 448–9. 6. See H.R. Woudhuysen (ed.), Love’s Labour’s Lost (Arden Shakespeare, 1998), 75–6. 7. Shakespeare, Poems, 20–21. 8. See Marlowe, Poems, xxv. 9. Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘Chapman, George (1559/60–1634), poet and playwright’, ODNB. For Marlowe’s stay in Flushing, see Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (rev. edn, London, 2002), 278–85. 10. See B.J. Sokol, ‘Roydon, Matthew (fl. 1583–1622), poet’, ODNB. Sokol does not explore the question of whether Roydon did indeed flee to the Scottish court. 11. Roma Gill (ed.), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe 1: Translations (Oxford, 1987), 185. 12. B.L. Joseph, letter to the editor in English 8.43 (1950), 47–8. 13. BL MS Harley 280 fo. 101v. 14. Marlowe, Poems, xxix–xxx. 15. Nashe, 3.195–200. 16. For a full discussion of the Bishops’ Ban, and its possible motivation, see Cyndia Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997), 198–217. 17. Jackson, ‘Meres’, 229. 18. Jackson, ‘Meres’, 234. 19. Jackson, ‘Meres’, 235. 20. Jackson, ‘Meres’, 235 n. 32. 21. Jackson, ‘Meres’, 230. 22. Meres, 286r. 23. Jackson, ‘Meres’, 231. 24. ‘I will not praise, that purpose not to sell’: a ‘chapman’ was a man who sold things, so this could glance dismissively at the name of a poetic rival.

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5: silver-tonguèd melicert 1. Except where otherwise noted, quotations are taken from the second printing of Mourning garment, which has been somewhat revised and corrected. 2. Meres, 281v. 3. Meres, 281v–282r. 4. Meres, 57v. 5. Meres, 232r. 6. Meres, 254r. 7. Meres, 278r–v. 8. Meres, 47v–48r. 9. I have published a version of this discussion as ‘Francis Meres, Playgoer’, in N&Q 254.4 (2009), 579. 10. G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), Romeo and Juliet (New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1984), 5.3.170. 11. William Covell, Polimanteia (1595), sig. Q1v. 12. Strype, quoted in Stephen Wright, ‘Covell, William (d. 1613), writer and Church of England clergyman’, ODNB. 13. Ibid. 14. See Alan H. Nelson (ed.), REED: Cambridge (Toronto, Buffalo, London, 1989), 1.363-7, 2.1162–4. 15. Honigmann, Weever, 18; Robert Bearman, ‘ “Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?” Revisited’, SQ 53.1 (2002), 83–94. 16. John Weever, Epigrammes (1599), sig. E6v (in Honigmann, Weever). 17. Ibid., sig. E2r. 18. See Julian Lock, ‘Brooke, William, tenth Baron Cobham (1527–1597), nobleman and diplomat’, ODNB. 19. See Weever, Faunus, vii, 72–5. 20. Ibid., 77–80. 21. See David Kathman, ‘Weever, John (1575/6–1632), poet and antiquary’, ODNB. 22. John Weever, The Whipping of the Satyre (1601), sigs D2r, D3r. 23. See Shakespeare, Poems, 438–45, 463. 24. Kathman, ‘Weever, John’. 25. Emma Smith, ‘Chettle, Henry (d. 1603x7), printer and playwright’, ODNB. 26. Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle (London, 1934), 48. 27. See Shakespeare, Poems, 75–6. 28. Nashe, 3.131. 29. Jowett, ‘Chettle, Compositor’, 145. 30. Erne (ed.), The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, 29. 31. See Jowett, ‘Chettle and More’, 138. 32. See Jowett, ‘Chettle, Compositor’, passim. 33. Jenkins, Chettle, 28, 49. 34. Chettle, Garment, sig. C2r.

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35. Matthew Davies and Ann Saunders, The History of the Merchant Taylors’ Company (Leeds, 2004), 142–3. 36. Henry Petowe, Elizabetha quasivivens, and Richard Niccols, Expicedium (both 1603). 37. Jowett, ‘Chettle, Compositor’, 160. 38. Greene, Groatsworth, 41, 89, 91; and cf. Tilley, Proverbs, M1010, for an English version, ‘Once to have been happy is misery enough’. 39. Henslowe, 207, 209; 218; 208, 214, 216, 222; cf. Henslowe, Companion, 61–3. 40. See Smith, ‘Chettle’, ODNB. 41. See Ian W. Archer, ‘Bayning, Paul (c. 1539–1616), merchant’, ODNB. 42. Henslowe, Companion, 66. 43. A ‘bayard’ (OED n. 3) was ‘One blind to the light of knowledge, who has the self-confidence of ignorance’. 44. A ‘losel’ (OED n.) was ‘A worthless person; a profligate, rake, scoundrel’. The word occurs twice in Spenser’s Teares of the Muses (lines 226, 324); see Spenser, Shorter Poems, 278, 281. 45. Chettle, Garment, sig. B1r–v. 46. From Psalm 115: ‘Not unto us (O Lord) not unto us, but unto thy name give the praise’; cf. H5 4.8.124. 47. The first edition reads ‘for thou that’, corrected to ‘for thee’ in the second. 48. Thomas Watson, Meliboeus . . . Sive, Ecloga in Obitum Honoratissimi Domini Francisci Walsinghami (1590). 49. Cf. Spenser, Faerie Queene, V.ix.5, line 6 (‘So smooth of tongue, and subtile in his tale’); and the volley of insults in 1H4: ‘puke-stocking, caddis-garter, smooth-tongue’ (2.4.69–70). Cf. also ‘My tongue could never learn sweet smoothing word’ (R3 1.2.171). 50. The phrase ‘by agents’ did not appear in the first printing. 51. Chettle, Garment, sig. C2r–C3v. 52. Chettle, Garment, sig. D2r; cf. Spenser, Ruines of Time, lines 223–4: ‘Ne anie Poet seekes him to revive; / Yet manie Poets honourd him alive’ (Shorter Poems, 242). 53. Henslowe, 96. 54. Nashe, 1.192–3 (a tribute to the Puritan preacher Henry Smith, who had died in 1591). 55. There had been two editions of Menaphon in 1599. 56. Prescott, ‘Drayton’, ODNB. 57. Richard Niccols, Expicedium (1603), sig. B3r. 58. Jenkins, Chettle, 52. 59. See Steven W. May, ‘Dyer, Sir Edward (1543–1607), courtier and poet’, ODNB. 60. Cf. R.M. Sargent, At the Court of Queen Elizabeth: The Life and Letters of Sir Edward Dyer (London and New York, 1935), 165. 61. The first edition supplies ‘deere’; in the second the word appears as ‘decree’, which neither rhymes nor makes sense.

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62. For an account of John Lane’s later career, see Verne M. Underwood, ‘Lane, John (fl. 1600–1630), poet’, ODNB. The phrase ‘infant Muse’ occurs also in Queen Elizabeths losse, and King James his welcome, a book of only eight leaves by an unidentified ‘H.S.’. But the strongly Spenserian character of John Lane’s poem is more likely to have appealed to Chettle than the slight and mechanical verse of ‘H.S.’. 63. See Jeremy L. Smith, ‘East, Thomas (1540–1608), printer’, ODNB.

6: groom of the chamber 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Hackett, Myths. Hackett, Myths, 40–41. Hackett, Myths, 220–27, 236–40. Cf. Duncan-Jones, Ungentle, 107–8. Quoted in John R. Elliott, jun., ‘Edwards, Richard (1525–1566), poet and playwright’, ODNB; for a fuller text of Windsor’s account, see John R. Elliott et al. (eds), REED: Oxford (Toronto, 2004), 1.131–3. Gurr, Company, 302. See Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘MS Rawl. Poet. 85: Richard Tarlton and Spenser’s “Pleasant Willy” ’, BLR 20.1–2 (2007), 76–101. See Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge, 1998), 11–12. Duncan-Jones, Ungentle, 34. See Duncan-Jones, Ungentle, 45–8. Gurr, Company, 56–7. Woudhuysen (ed.), Love’s Labour’s Lost, 60–61. Ibid., 159. Wiles, Shakespeare’s Almanac, 32. LLL 5.2.339–56. Quoted from CSP (Venetian), vol. 9, in Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘ “Almost always smiling”: Elizabeth’s last two years’, in Elizabeth H. Hageman and Katherine Conway (eds.), Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England (New Jersey, 2007), 31–47. Quoted in M.W. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (Cambridge, 1915), 224. Leicester Bradner (ed.), The Poems of Queen Elizabeth I (Providence, R.I., 1964) 7, 75-6. Reviewed by Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Past, present and correct’, TLS, 7 November 2008. See, for instance, Frances A. Yates, A Study of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (Cambridge, 1936). Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Christs Teares, Nashe’s “forsaken extremities” ’, RES n.s. 49 (1998), 167–80.

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22. Andrew Ashbee, ‘Ferrabosco, Alfonso (c. 1575–1628), composer and viol player’, ODNB. 23. MND 4.1.138; and see Wiles, Shakespeare’s Almanac, 105. 24. I call her ‘Bess’ to distinguish her from her mother. 25. Wiles, Shakespeare’s Almanac, 172. 26. Honigmann, Lost Years, 152–3. 27. Wiles, Shakespeare’s Almanac, 43–5; however, I find Wiles’s detailed claims for precise astrological allusions to 19 February within Shakespeare’s play fascinating but unconvincing. Although there was much interest in astrology in this period, I think it more likely that the marriage was timed to coincide with Shrovetide, the last period for licensed revelry before the beginning of Lent, during which marriage was forbidden. 28. Chambers, Stage, 4.110. The other occasions when both companies presented plays at court were Twelfth Night 1601 and 27 December at the end of the same year (see Chambers, Stage, 4.113–14). 29. See Duncan-Jones, Ungentle, 11–15. 30. Cf. VA 1168, where ‘A purple flower sprung up, chequered with white’ from the blood of the dead Adonis; the poem’s many admirers probably noticed the variation on this myth in Oberon’s speech. 31. See Peter Holland (ed.), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oxford Shakespeare, 1994), 153. 32. Ibid., 112. 33. Cf. Wiles, Shakespeare’s Almanac, 139. For Elizabeth’s residence at Richmond that winter, see Marion Colthorpe, ‘Queen Elizabeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, N&Q 232 (1987), 205–7. 34. For an account of the reconstruction of Richmond by both Henry VII and Henry VIII, see Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (New Haven and London, 1993), 27–32. 35. Cf. Hackett, Myths. 36. HMC: Third Report (1872), 148. Many thanks to Nick de Somogyi for drawing my attention to the source of the phrase ‘(Dame) Pintpot’. 37. Hotson, Sonnets Dated, 149–56; Mark Nicholls, ‘Brooke, Henry, eleventh Baron Cobham (1564–1619), conspirator’, ODNB. 38. Hackett, Myths, 23–4. 39. Melchiori (ed.), The Merry Wives of Windsor, 18–30. 40. Jonson, 3.599–606, 602–3. 41. Evelyn May Albright, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy’, PMLA 42 (1927), 690–91. 42. Charles R. Forker (ed.), King Richard II (Arden Shakespeare, 2002), 55–90. 43. Ibid., 57. 44. Ibid., 120–22. 45. Alan Armstrong, ‘ “What is Become of Bushy? Where is Green?”: Metadramatic Reference to Doubling Actors in Richard II’, in Paul Menzer (ed.), Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage (New Jersey, 2006), 149–55.

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46. That is, 9 December. 47. See HMC: Cecil Papers, 5.287. 48. See David M. Bergeron, ‘The Hoby Letter and Richard II: A Parable of Criticism’, SQ 26 (1975), 477–80. 49. See Louis A. Knafla, ‘Hoby, Sir Edward (1560–1617), politician and diplomat’, ODNB. 50. Sir Edward Hoby, A Counter-Snarle for Ishmael Rabshacheh (1613), 14, 17, 19. 51. From Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of James the First (London, 1849), 1.60–61; see also R.S. Burns (ed.), John Day’s THE ISLE OF GULS: A Critical Edition (New York, 1980), Act 2, scene 3. 52. Pauline Croft, ‘Cecil, Robert, first earl of Salisbury (1563–1612), politician and courtier’, ODNB. 53. HMC: Cecil Papers, 6.202. 54. Cf. OED ‘occasion’ 9a (‘A conjunction of circumstances requiring or calling for action’); also 10a (‘Something that a person needs to do; necessary business’, current from 1587). 55. Cf. Chambers, Stage, 1.277 and passim. 56. Stow, Survey of London, 2.102, 122. 57. HMC: Cecil Papers, 7.39–40. 58. For the Cecil family’s early residence in Canon Row, see David Loades, The Cecils: Privilege and Power Behind the Throne (National Archives, 2007), 19. 59. See, for instance, Dudley Carleton’s remark to John Chamberlain on 6 February 1607 that ‘You must not fayle Sir Edward Hobby at his great feast on Thursday’; see N.E. McClure (ed.), The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia, 1939), 1.241; cf. ibid., 1.24. 60. All quotations from this dialogue are taken from the text included in John Nichols (ed.), Progresses of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1823), 3.552–3. 61. Hammer, 1–35; Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London, 2008), 281–6. 62. Jason Scott-Warren, letter to the editor, TLS, 7 June 2009. 63. For an account of Westcombe Manor, from which Greenwich Palace was clearly visible, see Retha M. Warnicke, William Lambarde: Elizabethan Antiquary 1536–1601 (London and Chichester, 1973), 9–11. 64. Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Elizabeth I and her “Good George” ’, in Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo (eds), Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (British Library, 2007), 40. 65. See Ian Archer, ‘The City of London and the Theatre’, in Richard Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2009), 396–442. 66. Forker (ed.), Richard II, 12–13. 67. For a list of verbal and metaphoric links, see ibid., 12n. 68. John Hayward, The life and Raigne of K. Henrie the fourth (1599) 55; cf. Richard II 2.1.57-66. 69. Nichols (ed.), Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, 3.553.

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70. That is, in the manner allegedly planned by Essex and Southampton, ‘surprising’ the monarch in order to free her from her evil councillors. 71. Chambers, WS, 2.325. 72. Chettle, Garment, sig. D1r. 73. Hayward, The life and Raigne, 132. 74. For a fuller account of Elizabeth’s death, see Duncan-Jones, ‘ “Almost always smiling” ’. 75. See Nicholls, ‘Percy’. 76. Nicholls, ‘Percy’. 77. Nicholls, ‘Percy’. 78. Hammer, 26. 79. Chambers, WS, 2.325. 80. Hammer, 14. 81. Hammer, 31. 82. For a bibliographical analysis of Loves martyr, see Shakespeare, Poems, 498–503; and for a facsimile of the appended Poeticall Essaies, ibid., 536–45. 83. For a fuller account, see Shakespeare, Poems, 107–9. 84. See Arnold Davenport (ed.), The Poems of John Marston (Liverpool, 1961), 140, 168.

7: sweet swan of avon! 1. Parnassus Plays, 337. I shall refer to the individual plays as Pilgrimage, 1 Return and 2 Return. 2. ‘I am not quite a gentleman, but you would hardly notice it but it cant be helped anyhow’: Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters, or Mr Salteena’s Plan (first published 1919; here from 1984 edition with illustrations by Posy Simmonds), 20–21. Mr Salteena is also described by his best friend as ‘not quite the right side of the blanket as they say in fact he is the son of a first rate butcher’ (41). 3. Parnassus Plays, 356. 4. Cf. Spenser’s ‘ecclesiastical eclogues’ – ‘Maye’, ‘July’ and ‘September’ – in his Shepheardes Calender (1579) (Shorter Poems, 85–105; 119–134; 151–65). 5. Parnassus Plays, 26. 6. Parnassus Plays, 24–6. 7. Parnassus Plays, 11–12. 8. Parnassus Plays, 183–5, 192; and cf. Duncan-Jones, Ungentle, 149, 158. 9. Parnassus Plays, 244. 10. Parnassus Plays, 341. 11. Parnassus Plays, 339. 12. Parnassus Plays, 350. 13. This is how the ‘audition’ scene was played in the staged reading coordinated by James Wallace at Shakespeare’s Globe on 6 December 2009. 14. Cf. Luc 1611; MV 3.2.44–5.

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283

15. See A.C. Fox-Davies, A Complete Guide to Heraldry, rev. edn J.P. BrookeLittle (London, 1969), 358. 16. See James P. Carley, ‘Leland, John (c. 1503–1552), poet and antiquary’, ODNB. 17. W.B. Rye (ed.), England as seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First (London, 1865), 6. 18. Chambers, Stage, 2.411–14, 526–31. 19. W.R. Streitberger (ed.), Jacobean and Caroline Revels Accounts, 1603–1642, Malone Society Collections 13 (London, 1986), 8–9; and cf. Schoenbaum, Documentary, 195–203. 20. Cf. OED ‘take’, v. 10a: ‘To catch the fancy or affection of; to excite a liking in; to captivate, delight, charm’. The usage was new, OED’s earliest example being from Jonson’s Epicoene (1605). 21. Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen (1647), sig. A2r. 22. For a fuller discussion, see Duncan-Jones, Ungentle, 136–41. 23. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (eds), Hamlet (Arden Shakespeare, 2006), Appendix 1.2 (pp. 468–9). 24. Bednarz, 22. 25. Duncan-Jones, Ungentle, 167–78. 26. Richard Dutton, ‘The Court, the Master of the Revels and the Players’, in Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2009), 362. 27. See John Twyning, ‘Dekker, Thomas (c. 1572–1632), playwright and pamphleteer’, ODNB. 28. Hoy, Dekker, 4.59–65. 29. Satiromastix, 2.2.41–2. All quotations from the play are taken from Fredson Bowers (ed.), The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (Cambridge, 1953), vol. 1. 30. Henslowe, 104. 31. Hoy, Dekker, 1.180. 32. For an account of varied appeals for clapping at the end of epilogues, see Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), 87–8. 33. Cf. Bodleian MS Eng. poet. d.3, fo. 42r; the passages are usefully transcribed in Hoy, Dekker, 1.309–10. 34. Anne Lancashire, ‘Dekker’s Accession Pageant for James I’, ET 12.1 (2009), 39–50. 35. Richard Dutton (ed.), Jacobean Civic Pageants (Keele, 1995), 20. 36. Jonson, 6.16. 37. For a fuller discussion of this passage, and of interactions between Shakespeare and Jonson, see Katherine Duncan-Jones (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 60–63. 38. Jonson, 8.583–4. 39. Honigmann, ‘Bed’, 43.

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40. Frank Marcham, William Shakespeare and his Daughter Susannah (London, 1931), 65. 41. Ibid., 67. 42. Levi Fox, ‘An Early Copy of Shakespeare’s Will’, SS 4 (1951), 69–77 (p. 71). 43. Cf. Schoenbaum, Documentary, 238. 44. For a collation of the many texts, see TxC, 163–4. 45. BL Lansdowne MS 777, fo. 67v. 46. Chambers, WS, 2.226. 47. See P.J. Finkelpearl, ‘Beaumont, Francis (1584/5–1616), playwright’, ODNB. 48. Yale MS Osborn fb 143, p. 20. 49. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (eds), The Tempest (Arden Shakespeare, 1999), 124.

INDEX Abell, James 176 Achilles Shield (Chapman) 144 Ackroyd, Peter 34–5 Acolastus (Gnaphaeus) 4 ‘Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare’ (Weever) 160–63, 202 Affaniae (Fitzgeffrey) 270n Agrippa, Henry Cornelius 113 The Alchemist (Jonson) 149–50 Alençon, François, Duc de 199–200 Alexander the Great 144 All Ovids Elegies: 3. Bookes. By C.M. Epigrams by J.D. 139–40 Allde, Edward 105, 172 Alley, Hugh 19–21, Fig. 1 Alleyn, Edward 93, 162–3 Altrocchi, Paul H. xiii, 35–6 Amores (Ovid) 130, 139–41 Amyntas 29, 159 Anglesey 144 The annuals of Great Brittaine 232 Antonio’s Revenge (Marston) 243 An Apology for Actors (Heywood) 93, 116–17 Arcadia (Sidney) 80, 167, 184 Archer, Ian 281n Arden, Robert 110–11 Arden family 110–12 Ariosto, Ludovico 53 Armstrong, Alan 213 The Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham) 85–7, 97–8 The Arte of Venerie (Gascoigne) 201 Ashford, Daisy 233 Asotus (Macropedius) 4 Aston, Sir Walter 126 Astrophel (Spenser) 29

Aubrey, John ix, 2–3, 6, 10–15, 25–6, 35 Augustus, Emperor 140, 157, 245 Bacon, Francis 221 Baines, Richard 134 Baldwin, T.W. 213 Bancroft, Richard 139–40 Barnham Broom (Norfolk) 64 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson) 251–2 Basilikon Doron (James I) 57 Basse, William 255–8 Bate, Jonathan 220–21 Bayning, Paul 176 Beard, Thomas 141 Bearman, Robert xii, 95–6, 269n Beauchamp family 112 Beaumont, Francis x, 124–5, 238–40, 255–7 Beaurline, L.A. 17 Bedford 121 Bednarz, James 241–2 Beeston, Christopher 35 Beeston, William 35 Bennett, Kate xiii Bentley, John 93 Bergeron, David 214 Berkeley family 203–5 Berkeley, Henry, 7th Baron Berkeley 203 Berkeley, Katherine (née Howard) 203 Berkeley, Sir Thomas 203–7 Berrill, Margaret xiii Beverley (Yorkshire) 8 Bible 4, 8, 15, 51 Daniel 181 Genesis 8

286

Index

Luke 4 Psalms 278n Revelation 86, 88 birds crows 39–40, 99, 106, 111 falcons 31, 101, 106–7, 111–12, Fig. 2, Fig. 4 magpies 168 martlets (swifts) 111–12 swans 236–8 Bishops Itchington (Warwickshire) 36 ‘Bishops’ Ban’ 62, 139–40 Blount, Edward 134–6 Bodenham, Jonas 176 Boleyn, Anne 106–7 Borukhov, Boris 275n Bosworth, Battle of 109, 193 Bradbrook, Muriel 92 Breton, Nicholas 103 Britannia (Camden) 35–6 Bromley, Thomas 166 Brooke, Henry, 11th Baron Cobham 208–9 Brooke, Ralph 31–2, 101, 110–12, 119, 275n Brooke, William, 10th Baron Cobham 164 Brooks, Baldwin 254 Brooks, Harold 207 Broughton, Hugh 50 Browne, William 255 Burbage, James 213 Burbage, Richard 28, 239, 258 acting roles 34, 82, 123–4, 213, 251 coat of arms 119 painter 110, 118 portrayals and allusions 37, 116–23, 234–6 promised honours xi, 117–19, 120–26, 238 Burghley, William Cecil, 1st Baron 43, 84–6, 91, 145, 160, 194, 215–17, 219

Burley-on-the-Hill (Rutland) 58 Bush, Douglas 130 Cade, Jack 21, 40–41 Cadiz 148, 216 calf-killing 2–4, 11–25 Cambridge 52, 156–7, 159 King’s College 160 Pembroke Hall 157 Queens’ College 158–60, 162–3 St John’s College xii, 14, 157, 171 234–6, 242 Trinity College 64, 70 Camden, William 35–6, 111, 119, 275n Canterbury (Kent) 49 Carey, Elizabeth (née Spencer) 81–2, 202 Carey, Elizabeth (‘Bess’, later Berkeley) 203–5, 207 Carey, Sir George, 2nd Lord Hunsdon 81, 195, 202–5, 207, 209–10, 220–21, 228 Carey, Henry, 1st Lord Hunsdon 87, 132, 195, 204, 207, 212, 215, 217, 220–21 Carleton, Dudley 128, 226, 281n Carroll, D. Allen 40, 42, 104 Carson, Neil 176 Castiglione, Baldassare 60 Castle, William 2, 7, 14 Cavendish, Henry 159 Cecil, Elizabeth (née Brooke) 218 Cecil, Frances 58 Cecil, Mildred (née Cooke) 214 Cecil, Sir Robert 58, 83–4, 126, 208, 213–19, 225, 227, 230 Cecil, William (father of Robert) see Lord Burghley Cecil, William (son of Robert) 58 Cephalus and Procris (Edwards) 28–31, 37, 95, 159 Chamberlain, Edward 64

Index Chambers, E.K. 2, 4, 33, 44, 55–6, 126–7, 207, 221, 255 Chapman, George 112, 251, Fig. 5 collaboration on Eastward Ho! 251 continuation of Hero and Leander 133–6, 147–50, 181, 185 contribution to Loves martyr 230–31 extracted by Pudsey 76 military career 134 rivalry with WS 129–36, 143–54, 156 translation of Homer 143–4, 147–51, 153 Charles, Prince (Duke of York, later King Charles I) 127 Chartley (Staffordshire) 208–9 Chaucer, Geoffrey 97–8, 106, 186–7, 191, 194, 255–7 Chester (Cheshire) 8 Chester, Robert xii, 155, 192, 229–32 Chettle, Henry x, xi–xii apologizes for epistle to Greenes Groatsworth 42–5, 52–3, 99, 103, 118–19 author of epistle to Greenes Groatsworth 31, 37–45, 98–100, 103, 170–72, 175, 176, 182–3, 197, 202 career as poet and playwright 170–73, 176, 190–91 co-author of Sir Thomas More 172–3 death 190–91 elegizes Queen Elizabeth 155, 173–91, 194, 224 imprisonment for debt 176 member of Stationers’ Company 52, 170–72, 188 supplements Romeo and Juliet 105, 172–3 Children of the Chapel Royal 194 Children of the Queen’s Chapel 49

287

Children of the Queen’s Revels 215 Children of St Paul’s 117, 242–3, 245 Christs teares over Jerusalem (Nashe) 74, 81–2 Chronicles (Holinshed) 212 Churchyard, Thomas 49 Churchyards good will (Churchyard) 49 Cicero 119 Clegg, Cyndia 139, 276n Clopton, Sir Hugh 35–6 Coach and Sedan (Peacham) 63–4 Coke, Sir Edward 224 Collier, John Payne 3 Collins, Francis 253–4 Colthorpe, Marion 280n Combe, John 108 Combe, Thomas 108 Comes, Natalis 131–2 The Complaint of Rosamond (Daniel) 29 Complaints (Spenser) 29 The Compleat Gentleman (Peacham) 64 Condell, Henry x, 239, 252 Cooke, Sir Anthony 214 Cooke, Robert 110 Cooper, Helen 12 Cope, Walter 86 Il Cortegiano (Castiglione) 60 A Counter-Snarle for Ishmael Rabshacheh (Hoby) 215 Covell, William 155, 158–62, 165 Coventry (Warwickshire) 7–12, 15 The Cradle of Security 61 Creede, Thomas 103–5 Croft, Pauline 216 Croydon Palace (Surrey) 45–9, 52, 180, 197–8 Cuffe, Henry 226 Cygnea Cantio (Leland) 237 Cynthia’s Revels (Jonson) 237, 242

288

Index

Daniel, Samuel 29, 120, 158–9, 180–81, 212 Danter, John 43, 103–5, 171–2 Davenant, Sir William 95 Davenport, Arnold 168–9 ‘Davyes Epigrams, with Marlowes Elegys’ (see All Ovids Elegies) Davies, Sir John 139–40 Davies, John, of Hereford 37, 112–28 Davison, Francis 137–8 Day, John 215 De Republica Anglorum (Smith) 101–3, 109 de Somogyi, Nick 280n de Witt, Jan 237 Deerfold (Shropshire) 166 A Defence of Poesy (Sidney) 97, 147 Deighton (otherwise Daighton), John 73 Dekker, Thomas 30, 32, 79–80, 83, 121, 170, 185, 190–91, 215, 241–51 Delia (Daniel) 29 Denbighshire 230 Dennis, Sir John 209 Deptford (Kent) 141 Derby, 5th Earl of (see Ferdinando Stanley) Derbyshire 4, 72 Dethick, Sir William 32, 101–4, 110–12, 119, 275n Devereux, Robert (see Essex, Earl of) A discourse of English poetrie (Webbe) 98 Discoveries (Jonson) 253 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 5, 138, 149–50 Doctor Who 193 Dodsworth, Martin xii Donne, John 255–6 Donne, John, the younger 255–6 Doran, Greg 201 Dowdall, John 2–3, 7, 14

Downton, Thomas 246 Drayton, Michael 11–12, 95, 100, 112, 126–7, 151, 153, 156, 159, 163–6, 183–4 Drummond of Hawthornden, William 251 Dudley, Robert see Leicester Dumbleton (Gloucestershire) 226 Dunsmore Heath (Warwickshire) 11–13, 15, 19 Dusinberre, Juliet 138 Dutton, Richard 243, 251 Dyer, Sir Edward 184–5 East, Thomas 188 East Bedfont (Middlesex) 46 Eastward Ho! (Jonson, Marston and Chapman) 251 Edmondes, Sir Thomas 215 Edmonds, Piers 83–4 Edmunds, Bridget 160 Edmunds, John 160 Edward I (Peele) 107–8 Edward VI, King 178 Edwards, Richard 194 Edwards, Thomas 28–31, 37, 95, 159 Egerton, Stephen 83, 273n An Elegie upon . . . ELIZABETH (Lane) 186–7 Elegie on the Countesse of Warwicke (Peacham) 63 Elizabeth I, Queen 9–10, 159, 175, 215, 238 Alençon courtship 198–201 assassination attempts 224–5 birth and christening 18, 99 coronation 127 death and funeral 173–4, 180–81, 185–6, 188–9, 194, 219, 225 elegies upon 155, 173–91 and Essex 146, 219–28, 230 as ‘Fairy Queen’ 209–11 heraldic emblems 106–7

Index and Jonson 207–8, 211, 233, 237, 238 as Phoenix 229–32 and players 33, 49–50, 192–212, 217–19 poetry 200–1 portraits 85, 201, Fig. 7 progresses 46–7 and Richard II 192, 212–13, 218–28 shipbuilding 188 as Venus 83–91 as Virgin Queen 187, 205–6, 210–12 visits Kenilworth 10, 205–6 visits Oxford 194 and WS xii, 83–5, 88–91, 182–3, 189, 192–212, 219–28 Elizabeth of York 177 Elizabeth, Princess (daughter of James I) 258 Elizabetha quasi vivens (Petowe) 185–6 Empson, William 56 Englandes mourning garment (Chettle) 155, 173–91, 224 Englands Helicon 137, 170–71 Ennius 163 Epicoene (Jonson) 283n Epigrammes (Jonson) 252 Epigrammes (Weever) 162–3, 169 Epigrams (Davies) (see All Ovids Elegyes) Erne, Lukas 172 Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of Earl Marshal 145–6 literary patronage 143–8, 151–2, 159, 221–2, 255 military career 83–4, 139, 143–6, 148, 208–9, 216, 221–2, 226, 271n rebellion 83–4, 145–6, 152, 219–30, 282n

289

trial and execution 152, 219, 221, 224, 228 Euphues (Lyly) 80 Evans, G. Blakemore 158 Every Man In his Humour (Jonson) 34–5, 60, 80, 150, 238, 250 Every Man Out of his Humour (Jonson) 60, 109, 150, 211, 231, 237–8, 240, 244–5, 250 Exton (Rutland) 58, 197 Faban, Edith 73, 77 The Faerie Queene (Spenser) 153, 278n Faunus and Melliflora (Weever) 166–70 Fenner, Sir Edward 228 Ferrabosco, Alfonso 202–3 Field, Richard 53–4, 85, 94, 144, 229 First Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher 238–40 First Folio of Jonson (see Workes) First Folio of Shakespeare x, xii, 34, 66, 219, 236, 239–41, 252, 256–8 The First Fowre Bokes of the civile wars (Daniel) 212 The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII (Hayward) 221–3, 225 The First Return from Parnassus 235 Fitzgeffrey, Charles 270n Fleay, F.G. 108 Fletcher, John 99, 128, 238–40 Foakes, R.A. 4 Forker, Charles 212, 222 Fox, Levi 254 Foxe, John 20 France 12, 93, 198, 200, 226, 271n Francescos Fortunes: Or the second part of Greenes Never too late (Greene) 39, 113–16 Frederick V, Elector Palatine 258 Frederick, Duke of Würtemberg 237 Friar, Stephen 102–3

290

Index

Fripp, Edgar 16 Frizer, Ingram 140, 142 Gadd, Ian xiii Gallus 245 Garter Feast 137, 209–11 Gascoigne, George 201, 211 The Gentlemans Exercise (Peacham) 65 Gidea Hall, Essex 214 Gill, Roma 135 Gillingham, Kent 215 Gloucester 73 Gloucestershire 36, 203–4, 226 Gnaphaeus, William 4 Goad, Roger 160 Goard, Mary 26 Goldsmiths’ Company 184 Gower, John 97–8 A gratulatorie poem (Drayton) 184 Great Yarmouth (Norfolk) 138 Greenblatt, Stephen 10 Greene, Robert career and works 13–14, 38, 41–52, 98, 75–6, 105, 113–16, 182–3, 197–8 death 37–9, 41–4, 48, 53, 99–100, 103, 105, 172 posthumous voice 27–8, 31, 33–4, 37–9, 42–4, 48, 103–5, 111, 133–4, 170–72, 182, 191, 197 Greene, Thomas 243 Greenes Ghost Haunting Conie Catchers 48 Greenes Groatsworth of witte first edition 27–8, 31, 33–4, 37–9, 41–7, 51–3, 99–100, 103, 105, 111, 133–4, 170–72, 175–6, 182–3, 197 second edition 103–5 Greenes Never too late (see Francescos Fortunes) Greenfield, Sayre N. 273n

Greenwich (Kent) 18, 224 Greenwich Palace 28, 193, 219–20, 238 Greenwich Park 220 Greville, Sir Fulke 184–5 Griffiths, Ralph A. 40 Groves, Beatrice 9–10 Guilford, Sir Henry 136 The Guls Horne-booke 79–80, 83 Gurr, Andrew xiii, 93, 117, 124, 197 Guy of Warwick 11–13, 15, 18–19, 186 (and see The Tragical of History . . . of Guy Earl of Warwick) Hackett, Helen xiii, 192–3 Hall, Dr John 254–5 Hall, Susanna (née Shakespeare) 254 Hamer, Douglas 3–4, 6 Hammer, Paul 220, 226–7 Hampton Court Palace (Surrey) 45–6 Harington, Sir John (translator) 53 Harington, Sir John, of Exton, 58 Harriott, Thomas 134 Hart, Joan (née Shakespeare) 11, 15 Harvey, Barbara xiii Harvey, Gabriel 29, 48, 64, 76, 105, 129, 171, 185, 240 Haughton, William 170 Have with you to Saffron-walden (Nashe) 29, 48, 105, 171 Hayward, Sir John 221–3, 225 ‘H.C.’ (Peacham’s friend) 62 Hellwis, Edward 86–8 Heminge, John x, 196, 219, 239, 252 Henri IV, King 271n Henry, Prince of Wales 57–8, 127, 203 Henry IV, King 221–2, 225, 237, 238 Henry V, King 165, 237 Henry VI, King 39 Henry VII, King 109, 177, 193, 224, 229, 280n

Index Henry VIII, King 4, 11, 50, 280n Henslowe, Philip 33, 40, 45, 170, 176, 245–6 Herbert, Edward, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury 127 Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke (née Sidney) 1 Herbert, Philip (later Earl of Montgomery) 125, 239–40, 258 Herbert, William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke 125, 146–7, 203, 239–40, 252, 255, 258 (and see ‘Master. W.H.’) Hero and Leander (Marlowe and Chapman) 29, 134–9, 147–8, 167, 181, 185 Heroides (Ovid) 134 Hertfordshire 71 Heywood, Thomas 93, 95, 113, 116–17, 128, 176 Hicks, Michael 58 Hill, Richard 96 Hoby, Sir Edward 213–19 Hoby, Elizabeth (née Cooke) 214 Hoby, Margaret (née Carey) 215 Hoghton, Sir Richard 166 Hoghton Hall (Lancashire) 160 Holinshed, Raphael 212 Holland, Hugh 258 Holland, Peter 34–6, 206–7 Homer 143–4, 147–9, 151, 153 Honigmann, E.A.J. ix, 17, 51, 73–4, 123, 160, 204, 253 Horace 39–40, 169, 182, 185, 233, 242, 244–50 Hoskins, William 171 Hot Anger Soon Cold (Jonson and Chettle) 182 Hotson, Leslie 94, 273n Houlbrooke, Ralph xiii Howard, Catherine, née Carey 205, 215 Howard, Charles, 2nd Baron Howard of Effingham 205, 215

291

Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 97 Hoy, Cyrus 246 Hughes, Alan 57–8, 65 An Humorous Day’s Mirth (Chapman) 133 Humours Heav’n on Earth (Davies) 119–20, 126 Hunsdon, Lord see Carey Hunt, Richard 35–6 Hurault, André 198 Hymnus in Cynthiam (Chapman) 129–33 Hymnus in Noctem (Chapman) 130 ‘I.F.’ 166 ‘I.W.’ 166 The Iliad 143–4, 151, 153 ‘In Eripham vetulam’ (Weever) 163 ‘In Laudem Authoris’ (R.H.) 166 Ireland 83, 121, 139, 143–6, 180, 208–9, 212, 221–6 Ireland, William 192–3 Irving, Sir Henry 128 Isham, Mistress 38 The Isle of Dogs (Jonson and Nashe) 140 The Isle of Gulls (Day) 215 Isle of Wight 202 Italy 93, 115, 199, 243 Jack Drum’s Entertainment (Marston) 72 Jackson, MacDonald P. x, xii, 117–18, 129–30, 133, 135, 141–2, 147–51, 157 Jaggard, William 116 James I, King (James VI of Scotland) accession 37, 117–18, 127, 145, 152, 174–5, 178, 183–7, 250 as author 57 coronation 126–7 London progresses 189–90, 250–51

292

Index

peace negotiations 120–21, 180, 189–90 and players xi, 28, 117–18, 120–28, 194, 237–8 and WS xi, 117–18, 120–28, 155, 189–90, 194, 237–8 Jenkins, Harold 170–71, 184–5 The Jew of Malta (Marlowe) 71, 137, 141 John, King 110 John of Stratford 35–6 Johnson, Arthur 210 Johnson, Gerard 256 Jones, Inigo 120 Jones, Robert 95–6 Jonson, Ben 80, 112, 190 appearance 242, 249, Fig. 8 and Chettle 181–2 and Davies 120–21 and Dekker 185, 240–51 and Elizabeth I 207–8, 211, 233, 237–8 extracted by Pudsey 76 as Horace 181–2, 185, 233, 242, 246–51 and James I 233, 237–8 kills Spencer 40 and Marston 185, 230–31, 240–51 and Nashe 140, 182 and WS x, xii, 34, 41, 108–9, 149–50, 153, 170, 207–8, 233, 235–8, 240–53, 283n Joseph, B.L. 136 Jowett, John 37, 105, 171, 173–4 Julius Caesar 16, 23, 119 Justice, Alan D. 8 Juvenal 47, 169 Katherine of Berain (Catherine Tudor) 229 Kathman, David 73 Keats, John 153 Kempe, Will 28, 234–6, 242

Kenilworth Castle (Warwickshire) 10, 205–6, 211 Kind-Harts Dreame (Chettle) 43–5, 99, 103, 119 King’s Men (company) 28, 117, 120, 124, 194, 197, 237–40, 274n Knell, Rebecca (later Heminge) 196 Knell, William 33, 93, 196 The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont) 124–5 A knights Conjuring (Dekker) 30, 190–91, 269n The Knight’s Tale (Chaucer) 194 Knolles, Richard 269n Knollys, Sir Francis 212 Knowles, Ronald 268n Knyvett, Thomas 224 Kyd, Thomas 5, 80, 134, 235–6, 251 Lady Jane (Chettle et al.) 176 Lambarde, William 219–20, 223–4 Lancashire 160, 166 Lancashire, Anne 250–51 Lane, John 186–7 Langham, Robert 10 Langley, Francis 237 Lawe, Matthew 173, 185 Lee, Sir Robert (Lord Mayor of London) 174 Legate, John 159 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of 10, 15, 181, 205–6 Leicester’s Men 15, 197 Leicestershire 124 Leishman, J.B. 242 Leland, John 237 Lenten Stuffe (Nashe) (see Nashes Lenten Stuffe) Linley, Paul 135 Loades, David 281n Lodge, Thomas 113, 184, 215 London 14–15, 26, 48, 60, 63, 71, 84, 100, 104, 117, 122–3, 146, 157, 160, 174, 176, 180, 189,

Index 190–91, 197, 199, 208–9, 214, 218, 221, 223, 226–8, 236–7, 250–51, 255 Bankside 238 Barbican Street 99 Blackfriars 203–4, 207, 273n Blackfriars gatehouse 3 Blackfriars theatre 124, 215 Bridewell prison 61, 215 Canon Row 214, 217–19, 281n Cecil House, Strand 217, 227 College of Arms 31–2, 98–9, 101–12, 119, 240, 275n Curtain theatre 193 Dowgate 38 Durham House 127 East Cheap Market 19–21, Fig. 1 Essex House 227 Fleet prison 86 Garter House 99 Globe theatre 23–4, 128, 139, 146, 164–5, 226–8, 243, 247–50, 256 Hope theatre 251 Inns of Court 36, 140, 159 Marshalsea prison 86, 176 Middle Temple 140 Mountgodard Street 21 Newgate prison 61, 86 plague 45–6, 48, 100, 191, 202 and Rome 162–3 Rose theatre 163 St Andrew Hubbard 26 St Ann, Blackfriars 273n St Clement Danes 229 St James’s Palace 127 St Leonard’s, East Cheap 26 St Paul’s Cathedral 21, 214–15, 243 St Paul’s Cross 178–9 St Stephen’s Chapel 218

293

Somerset House 117, 120–21 Southwark 139, 253, 256 Strand 119, 217 Swan theatre 237 Theatre (Shoreditch) 213 theatres 2, 45, 100, 116, 238 (and see individual theatres) Tower of London 86, 222, 228 Westminster 191, 202, 227 Westminster Abbey 98, 145, 174, 255–6 Whitehall Palace 127, 137, 197, 218, 224, 238 The London Florentine (Chettle) 176 Longleat (Wiltshire) 58 Longleat document (see Titus Andronicus) Lord Admiral’s Men 163–6, 173, 205, 215, 245–6 Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later King’s Men) 28, 35, 81, 117, 163–6, 194–8, 204–7, 210–22, 226–8, 235, 242–50 Lord Strange’s Men 46 Loves martyr (Chester) xii, 155, 192, 229–32, 243 Lowin, John 239 Lownes, Matthew 232 Lubinus 153 Lumley, John, 1st Baron Lumley 223–4 Lust’s Dominion (Marston and Dekker) 245 Lyly, John 80, 188 Mabbe, James 258 McEachern, Claire 74 McKerrow, R.B. 48–9, 52 MacLure, Miller 137–8 McLuskie, Kate xiii McMullan, Gordon 19 Macrobius 39

294

Index

Macropedius, George 4 Maecenas 157, 244 The Magnificent Entertainment (Jonson and Dekker) 250–51 Maguire, Laurie xiii The Malcontent (Marston) Mankynde 5 Manners, Francis, 6th Earl of Rutland 110 Marcham, Frank 254 Market Deeping (Lincolnshire) 121 Marlowe, Christopher life and death 5, 29, 44, 98, 134, 139–42, 149 literary career 29, 37–8, 42–4, 71, 133–4, 150, 153, 167 posthumous influence 29, 133–43, 147–50, 181, 185, 191 Marprelate controversy 30, 49–50, 53 Marston, John admiration for WS 231–2, 241–5 attacked by Jonson 231, 240–45, 247–8, 251 extracted by Pudsey 72, 76 literary career and works 121, 169, 185, 230–32, 241–5, 256 Mary I, Queen 4, 127, 178 A Marvell, Deciphered (Hellwis) 86–7 ‘Master. W.H.’ 146, 252 Mauley family 110 Maxwell, J.C. 71 Melchiori, Giorgio 137, 209–10 Menander 116, 163 Menaphon (Greene) 13–14, 38, 183, 270nn Merchant Taylors’ Company 173–4 Meres, Francis x, 141, 149, 151, 155–60, 162, 170, 183, 202 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 134, 233–4 Meyrick, Sir Gelly 226 Michaelmas Term (Middleton) 117 Microcosmos (Davies) 118–19

Middleton, Thomas 30, 117, 253 Miles Gloriosus (Terence) 215 Millington, Thomas 173 The Mirror of Martyrs (Weever) 163–6, 170 The Mirror of Monsters (Rankins) 42 Moffett, Dr Thomas 1–2 Moss, Ann 271n Mounteagle, William Parker, 4th Baron 226 Munday, Anthony 32, 172–5 Munro, John 208 Murphy, Andrew 95 Murry, John Middleton 130 Musaeus 135, 138, 148–9, 181, 185 Mythologiae (Comes) 131–2 Narcissus (Edwards) 28–31, 37, 95, 159 Nash, Elizabeth (née Hall) 254 Nash, Thomas (John Hall’s son-inlaw) 254 Nashe, Thomas 62, 203, 207, 256 and Chettle 37–8, 42–4, 171, 182 death 47, 182, 191, 270n and Dekker 32, 190–91 and Edwards 29–30 extracted by Pudsey 74–6, 79, 81–2 and Greene 13–14, 37–8, 42–54, 98, 105, 191, 197–8 and Harvey, 48, 105, 171, 240 and Jonson 140, 182 and Marlowe 37–8, 42, 98, 138–9, 191 and Peele 37–8, 42–3, 98, 191 and WS 13–15, 38, 45, 50–54, 92–4, 98, 101, 105, 274n Nashes Lenten Stuffe (Nashe) 47, 76, 138–9 Nelson, Alan H. xiii, 35–6 Newes from Hell (Dekker) 32, 190 Netherlands 86, 134, 179, 200 Niccols, Richard 184 Nicholl, Charles 141

Index Nicholls, Mark 226 Nonsuch Palace (Surrey) 146, 225 Northumberland, Henry Percy, 8th Earl of 226 Northumberland, Henry Percy, 9th Earl of 132 Norwich (Norfolk) 191 Nowell, Alexander 214–15 Oenone and Paris (Heywood) 95, 116 Okes, Nicholas 116 Oklahoma! 6 Old Fortunatus (Dekker) 215, 246 Oldcastle, Sir John 163–5 Oldys, William 35, 50 Olive, Richard 103–4 ‘On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare’ (Basse) 255–8 Order of the Bath 126–7 Order of the Garter 137, 209–11 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto) 53 Ovid 130, 133–4, 139–42, 151, 157, 167, 230, 233–4 Ovids Banquet of Sense (Chapman) 133 Oxford 159, 171, 194, 226 Brasenose College 244 Christ Church 194 Corpus Christi College 194 Magdalen Hall 158–9 Merton College 226 Oriel College 35–6 Trinity College 215 A paean triumphal (Drayton) 184 Palamon and Arcite (Edwards) 194 Palladis Tamia (Meres) x, 141, 149, 151, 155–60, 162, 170, 183, 202 Park Hall (Warwickshire) 111–12 The Parliament of Fowls (Chaucer) 106 ‘Parnassus Plays’ 157, 234 (and see the First and Second Return from Parnassus)

295

The Passionate Pilgrim 137, 151 ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ (Marlowe) 137–8 Patient Grissill (Dekker, Haughton, Chettle) 170 Paule, Sir George 46, 49 Peacham, Henry 36, 55–72, 74, 156–7, 163, 261–2, 271n, Fig. 3 Pearce, Edward 243 Pedantius 64 Peele, George 37–8, 42, 58, 67–9, 98, 107–8, 163, 191 Peirs Gaveston (Drayton) 95, 159 Pembroke, Earl of (see William Herbert) Penry, John 53 Percy, Sir Charles 226–8 Percy, Henry (see Earl of Northumberland) Percy, Sir Josceline 226 Perkins, Richard 93 Perrott, Sir John 43 Persius 169 Petit, Jaques 58 Petowe, Henry 136, 185–6, 189 Phillips, Augustine 213, 226–8 Phillips, George 83, 273n Philostratus 133 Pictorius, Georgius 75 Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the divell (Nashe) 32, 43–4, 62, 74–5, 79, 92–4, 101, 105, 182, 270n, 271n Piers Plainnes seaven yeres Prentiship (Chettle) 170–71 Plautus 115, 163 Plumley, Humphrey 96 Plutarch 23–4 Poetaster (Jonson) xii, 185, 231, 240–48, 250 Poeticall Essaies (Chester) (see Loves martyr) ‘Poets’ War’ xii, 170, 233, 235, 240–51

296

Index

Polimanteia (Covell) 158–60 Poly-Olbion (Drayton) 153, 184 Popham, Sir John 228 Practises and Treasons (A declaration of the practises & treasons attempted) (Bacon) 221 Prescott, Anne Lake 184 Priscianus vapulans 64 Privy Council 32, 45–6, 84–8, 90–91, 220, 227–8 Proudfoot, Richard xiii Puckering, Sir John 134 Pudsey, Edward 56–8, 68, 72–83, 94, 156, 250 Pudsey, Edward the younger 73 Pudsey, Thomas 72 Puttenham, George 85, 87–8, 97–8 Queen’s Men 15, 33, 49, 62, 195–7 Quiney, Adrian 96 Quiney, Richard 96 Rainolds, John 194 Ralegh, Sir Walter 257–8 Rankins, William 42 Ratseis Ghost 121–5 Ratsey, Gamaliel 121–2 The Returne of Pasquill (Nashe) 30 Reynolds, William xiv, 83–91, 94, 121 ‘R.H.’ 166 Rich, Penelope (née Devereux) 208–9 Richard I, King 214 Richard II, King 98, 212, 214, 222–5 Richard III, King 109, 214 Richmond, Velma 11, 13 Richmond Palace (Surrey) 199, 205, 207–8, 217, 220, 238 Rider, Sir William (Lord Mayor of London) 228 Robson, Flora 224 Roscius xiii, 36, 119, 162–3 Rowe, Nicholas 35, 50 Rowlands, Samuel 48

Rowse, A.L. 7 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 201 Roydon, Matthew 132–4 The Ruines of Time (Spenser) 278n Russell, Thomas 253–4 St Albans (Hertfordshire) 202 Salusbury, Sir John 229–32 Salusbury, Owen 229 Sanford, James 113 Satiromastix (Dekker) 185, 242–51 Savage, Richard 77, 273n Scaramelli, Giovanni Carlo 199 Schoell, F.L. 276n Schoenbaum, Samuel 2–3, 6, 25–6, 108 ‘School of Night’ 148, 201 Scotland 134, 178 Scott-Warren, Jason xiii, 220 The Scourge of Folly (Davies) 113, 120–21 The Scourge of Villainie (Marston) 231–2 The second part of Hero and Leander (Petowe) 136, 185 The Second Return from Parnassus 233–6, 240–42, 246–7 Segar, William 112, 119 Sejanus his Fall (Jonson) 34, 251 Seneca 38 The Seven Books of the Iliads (Chapman) 143–4, 147, 151 Sextus Empiricus 48 Seymour, Edward, 1st Earl of Hertford 218 The Shadow of Night (Chapman) 129–34, 148 Shakespeare, Anne (née Hathaway) 52–3 Shakespeare, Gilbert 11, 15 Shakespeare, Hamnet 104, 191 Shakespeare, John 2–3, 6, 11, 13, 25, 32, 95–6, 103–6, 109–12, 119, 193

Index Shakespeare, Mary (née Arden) 95, 110–11 Shakespeare, Richard 11, 15 Shakespeare, William accent and appearance 36–7, 247–8 acting career x–xi, xiii, 10–15, 25, 27–54, 107–8, 114–19, 124, 163, 196–7, 213, 234–5, 246–51, 256–8 and Burbage xi, 110, 117–26, 233–6 as calf-killing ‘kill-cow’ ix, xi, 1–26, 38 and Chapman x–xi, 129–36, 143–56 and Chettle x–xii, 27–54, 98–100, 103, 118–19, 155, 170–91, 197, 202 childhood 1–26, 205–6 coat of arms 31–2, 101–12, 119, 240, Fig. 2, Fig. 4 as crow x, 14, 27–54, 91, 98–100, 183, 202 death and monument x, xii, 108–12, 170, 253–8 and Elizabeth I xi–xii, 83–5, 88–91, 182–3, 189, 192–212, 219–28 extracted by Pudsey 56–7, 68, 72–83, 156 First Folio x, xii, 34, 236, 258 and grain-hoarding 60, 240 and Greene 34, 37–9, 41–5, 98, 113–16, 182 as ‘groom of the chamber’ 33–4, 192–8, 202, 213, 228, 231 and James I xi, 117–18, 120–28, 155, 189–90, 194, 237–8 as ‘Johannes fac totum’ 27, 30–31, 38–42, 201 and Jonson x, xii, 34, 41, 60, 108–9, 149–50, 153, 170, 207–8, 233, 235–8, 240–53, 283n

297 and Marlowe xi, 38–9, 43–4, 98, 129–54 marriage 7, 52–3 and Marston 231–2, 241–5 and Nashe 13–15, 38, 45, 50–54, 92–4, 98, 101, 105, 274n patrons 53–4, 83–4, 92, 94–100, 129, 132–3, 145–7, 150–52, 159, 239–40 and Peele 37–8, 42, 58, 67–9, 98, 107–8, 163, 191 promised honours xi, 113, 116–29, 238 as swan x, xii, 233, 236–40, 253 and Welsh 247–8 will 3, 6, 25, 108, 253–4 All’s Well that Ends Well 257 As You Like It 35, 138–42, 148–9, 192, 196, 214 The Comedy of Errors 4–5, 254–5, 274n Hamlet 35, 123–4, 249, 256–7, 268n and butchery 16 composition 136, 154, 156, 168–9, 183, 242–3 early version of 14 extracted by Pudsey 73–4, 78–83 and feathery headdresses 40, 70–71 reception 122–3, 129, 156, 172–3, 243, 273n Quarto and Folio texts 80–82, 241 1 Henry IV 51, 125, 156, 164–6, 208–9, 247, 278n 2 Henry IV 5–6, 16, 51, 80, 125, 164–6, 209–10, 226, 268n Henry V 146, 247 1 Henry VI 14, 51–2, 92–3, 105–6, 193, 268n, 274n 2 Henry VI 19–22, 40–41, 51–2, 57, 92, 177, 193

298

Index

3 Henry VI 11, 22–4, 27, 39, 40–42, 45, 51–2, 57, 92, 154, 177, 193 Henry VIII (All is True) 18–19, 34, 99, 128 Julius Caesar 23–4, 51, 164–5, 183, 244 King John 17–19, 22, 154, 268n King Lear 125 A Lover’s Complaint 154 Love’s Labour’s Lost 16, 51, 103, 133, 158, 167, 169, 183, 192, 198–202, 206, 214, 268n Macbeth 22–3, 30, 60 The Merchant of Venice 103, 238, 282n The Merry Wives of Windsor 5–9, 137–8, 192, 208–11, 214, 228, 232, 247–50, 268n A Midsummer Night’s Dream 103, 157–8, 192, 202–12, 217 Much Ado About Nothing 6, 16, 74, 77, 83, 228 Othello 56–7, 68, 72, 74, 80 Pericles 110 ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ 192, 229–32 The Rape of Lucrece 22, 282n composition 113–14, 149, 151, 154, 212–13 dedication 54, 92, 94, 96–7, 129 publication 54, 94, 103 reception ix, 103, 129, 133, 151, 158–9, 162, 179, 182, 194, 229–30, 235 Richard II xii, 103, 146, 155, 162, 169, 192, 193, 211–28, 232, 268n Richard III 22, 74–5 162, 169, 183, 231–2, 235–6, 256–7, 278n Romeo and Juliet 73, 103, 105, 157–8, 162, 172–3, 232, 235

Shakespeare’s Sonnets xi, 28, 128, 133, 147, 150–54, 189 ‘onlie begetter’ 146, 252 publication xii, 126, 190, 252 Sonnets 1–126 243–4 Sonnet 74 142–3 Sonnets 78–86 133, 151, 153 Sonnet 84 143, 151–2 Sonnet 85 152–3 Sonnet 86 129, 143–51, 152–3 Sonnet 87 152 Sonnets 104–126 117–18 Sonnet 107 145, 152, 189–90 Sonnet 110 27–8, 54, 117–18, 128 Sonnet 111 16, 27–8, 54, 117–19, 128 Sonnet 112 117–18, 128 Sonnets 123–125 152 Sonnet 123 152, 190 Sonnet 125 146, 190 Sonnet 145 149 The Tempest 16, 156, 236, 238, 252, 258 Timon of Athens 34, 253 Titus Andronicus 92, 197, 251 extracted by Pudsey 68 Longleat manuscript (Peacham) 55–72, 163, 261–2, 271n, Fig. 3 Peele’s co-authorship 14, 67–8 108, 163, 251 Quarto and Folio texts 55–6, 65–71 Troilus and Cressida 253 Twelfth Night 111, 228, 242–3, 270n Venus and Adonis ix, 22, 154 composition 51, 53–4, 113–14, 134 dedication 53–4, 83–4, 94–5, 132–3, 159 publication 53, 84–6, 89, 94–5, 134

Index reception ix, 29–30, 83–91, 95, 116, 129–34, 136, 151, 159, 162, 167–9, 171, 194, 229–30, 235, 259, 280n The Winter’s Tale 24–5, 238, 252 Shakespeare in Love 193 Shakespeare’s Globe 282n ‘The Sheepheards Song of Venus and Adonis’ (Chettle) 171 The Shepheardes Calender (Spenser) 30, 175, 177, 282n The Shoemakers’ Holiday (Dekker) 246 Shrewsbury (Shropshire) 9 Sidney, Sir Philip 1, 29, 80, 97, 147, 159, 167, 179, 184–5 Simier, Jean 199 Simmes, Valentine 121, 189 Simonides 118 Sir John Oldcastle (Drayton et al.) 163–4 Sir Thomas More (Munday et al.) 172–3 Sittingbourne (Kent) 160 Smith, Emma xiii Smith, Henry 182, 278n Smith, Sir Thomas 101–3, 109 Smith, Wentworth (‘mr smythe’) 176 Smith, William 98 Southampton, Elizabeth, Countess of (née Vernon) 208–9 Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of coat of arms 106–7 family 98–9 friend of Essex 83–4, 144–5, 208–9, 224, 282n literary patron 54, 84, 91, 94–9, 126, 132, 144–7, 194, 208–9 playgoer 208–9 Spain 12, 93, 117, 120, 178–80, 200 Spanish Armadas 63, 178–9, 188, 227

299

The Spanish Moor’s Tragedy (see Lust’s Dominion) The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd) 80, 235–6, 251 Speed, John 120 Spencer, Gabriel 40 Spenser, Edmund 15, 29, 30, 153, 157, 159, 175, 177, 180–81, 184, 187–8, 191, 209, 234, 255–7, 278nn, 279n, 282n The Squire’s Tale (Chaucer) 186–7 Stafford, Simon 48 Stanley, Edward, of Winwick 166 Stanley, Ferdinando, Lord Strange, 5th Earl of Derby 132 Stanley, William, 6th Earl of Derby 218 Stanley family 109, 170 Stationers’ Company 43, 52–3, 173 Stationers’ Register 28, 43, 53, 95, 103–5, 130, 135 Stern, Tiffany xiii, 283n Stonley, Richard 89 Stow, John 218 Strange, Lord (see Stanley, Ferdinando) Strange’s Men 46–9 Stratford-upon-Avon (Warwickshire) xi, 2–3, 9–12, 15, 35–6, 52–3, 94–6, 101, 108–12, 238, 254 Bridge 35–6 Henley Street 2–3, 6, 11, 25, 104, 107, 193 Holy Trinity Church 2, 35–6, 108–12, 170, 253, 256 New Place 254–5 Sheep Street 6, 15, 25 Summers, Will 48–51 Summers last will and testament (Nashe and Greene) 45–52, 75–6, 105, 197–8 Surrey, Earl of (see Henry Howard) A Survey of London (Stow) 218

300

Index

Talbot, John 93–4 Tarlton, Richard 60–64, 93, 149, 192, 195–6 Taylor, Joseph 239 Taylor, Neil 74, 256 The Teares of the Muses (Spenser) 177, 278n Terence 115, 120, 163, 215 The Terrors of the Night (Nashe) 203, 207 ‘T.H.’ 166 Thalia’s banquet (Peacham) 62 The more the merier (Peacham) 62–3 The Theatre of Gods Judgements (Beard) 141 A third blast of retraite from plaies and theatres 32 Thomas, Sidney 105 Thompson, Ann 74, 256 Thurley, Simon 280n Thynne family 58, 218 Tibullus 245 Tilbury (Essex) 188 Tilney, Edmund (Master of Revels) 198, 219 ‘To the memorie of M. W. Shakespeare’ (Mabbe) 258 ‘To the memory of my beloved, The AUTHOR’ (Jonson) 41, 207–8, 233–40, 252–3 ‘To those Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance’ (see Greenes Groatsworth of witte) Tobin, J.J.M. xii–xiii, 51 Tong (Shropshire) 170 Towne, John 33 The Tragedy of Hoffman (Chettle) 173 The Tragical History . . . of Guy Earl of Warwick 12–13, 18 Trevor, Sir Richard 230 Trussler, Simon xiii The Truth of our Times (Peacham) 59–64

Tyler, Adrian 6, 25–6 Tyler, Elizabeth 26 Tyler, Richard 3, 6, 25 Tyler, William 3, 6–7, 15, 25–6 Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, 2nd Earl of 143, 180, 221 ‘Upon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenicke Poet’ (Holland) 258 Vaughan, Alden T. 258 Vaughan, Virginia Mason 258 Vickers, Brian 52, 108, 274n Virgil 245 Vitruvius 120 Wakefield (Yorkshire) 8 Walker, William (WS’s godson) 3 Wallace, James 282n Walsingham, Lady Audrey 134, 147–8 Walsingham, Sir Francis 179 Walsingham, Sir Thomas 134 ‘War of the Theatres’ (see ‘Poets’ War’) Warner, Walter 134 Warner, William 181 Warnicke, Retha M. 281n Warwickshire 11–12, 14, 36–7, 52, 96, 100, 109, 111–12, 197, 203–4, 238 Watson, Thomas 29, 42, 159, 179 Webbe, William 98 Webster, John 176 Wells, Stanley 206 Weever, John x, 155, 160–70, 202, Fig. 6 Westcombe (Surrey) 220, 281n What You Will (Marston) 243 The Whipping of the Satyre (Weever) 169 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury 45–54, 62, 139–40, 160, 180–81, 271n

Index whittawing 6–8 Wiggins, Martin xiii The wil of wit (Breton) 103 Wiles, David 199, 203–4, 207, 280n Wilkins, George 110 Williams, Sir Roger 271n Willis, Robert 61 Wilmcote (Warwickshire) 111 Wilson, F.P. 52 Wilson, John Dover 39, 41, 142 Wilson, Robert 149 Windsor, Miles 194 Windsor Castle (Berkshire) 4, 209–10 Wolfe, John 29, 135 The Woman Hater (Beaumont) 124–5 Worcester (diocese) 50, 52

301

Workes (Jonson) 34, 252 Woudhuysen, Henry ix, xii, 51, 198, 273n Wright, John 234–5 Wright, William 104 Wriothesley, Henry (see Southampton, 3rd Earl of) Wriothesley, Sir Thomas 98–9 Wriothesley, William 99 Wriothesley family 98–9 Yarmouth (see Great Yarmouth) York (Yorkshire) 8 The Young Visiters (Ashford) 233 Zabeta (Gascoigne) 211 Zeuxis 120