Dear Me,

Here we go again kids :D.  I should have dedicated this blog to Shakespeare.  It would have made this so much easier.

Cheers

:)

Shakespeare: The Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part Three

Chapter 25:This Keene Incounter of Our Wits

Shakespeare arrived in the city at the most opportune possible moment, when the drama of Peele and Lyly had become highly fashionable and the new drama of Kyd and Marlowe were just emerging. The Queen's Men were performing on different occasions   and in different seasons at the Bull in Bishopsgate.  Gate.  Lord Strange's Men were at the Rose.  The Queen's Men lost their prime position in 1588 and were supplanted by the combined talents of the Lord Admiral's Men and Lord Strange's Men.  This may have been the moment when Shakespeare himself joined Strange's company.

The principal theatrical companies themselves were significantly larger than they were at a later date, but this may have been in part to loose association and amalgamations.  The number of players in each company rose from seven or eight to more than twenty.  The playwrights themselves grew more ambitious and began to work on a larger scale and the plays grew longer.  All of these forces helped to create a truly poular drama, of which Shakespeare was the principal beneficiary.  It was a small world but had a large effect upon the London public.  It was the most popular form of artistic expression, and in that sense helped to create the new atmosphere of urban life.

The boys' companies were the darlings of the hour.  It may now seem to be an odd taste for child actors rather than adult actors but it is connected with the sacred origins of the drama and the desire to purge it from all associations with vulgarity or vagabondage.  The residents of Blackfriars were not happy with the press of people who attended the productions of the Chapel Royal Children and in 1584 the owner of the building forced out the boys and masters.

Yet the rise of the professional adult companies, employing young playwrights and larger bands of actors and steadily eclipsed the popularity of the boys.  By 1590 the children had effectively disappeared, only to emerge a decade later under the guidance of another new wave of playwrights.

Like literary young men in London he had to make money in anyway he could.  He and his contemporaries tended to congregate together.  Shakespeare knew men such as Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, all of them "spirited reckless, drunken, promiscuous, wild and in the case of Marlowe dangerous."  They were the roaring boys of the 1580s and 1590s,  It would be a mistake to call them a coterie but they were all part of the same literary tendency.  

So the stage was always ready for new voices.  Shakespeare entered London at a moment of dramatic revelation.  There were new dramas and new dramatists coming into their ascendant.  Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy had caused something of a sensation and was swiftly followed by Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine.  The Spanish Tragedy inaugurated the fashion for revenge tragedy on the London stage.  It inspired a very early version of Hamlet, which there is some reason to suppose was written by the young Shakespeare.  The Spanish Tragedy has many parallels with the more famous play.  It has a ghost, a variety of murders as well as scenes of madness, real and feigned.  It stages a play within a play that promotes revenge.  Unlike the later version of Hamlet it is suffused by an unvarying rhetoric of vengeance and retribution.  It was an immensely powerful and seductive language with sensationalist imagery.  It became a form of secular liturgy.  When Hieronimo advances upon the stage, in a state of undress he calls out 

What outcries pluck me from my naked bed,

And chilling my throbbing hear trembling fear?

The lines became catchphrases, repeated and parodied by other dramatists.

It is important to note that playwriting was a young man's occupation.  Kyd and Marlowe were no more than twenty-three or twenty-four (perhaps even younger).  If Shakespeare joined Lord Strange's Men in 1586,, he would have very soon have become acquainted with Kyd and Marlowe.  He acted in their plays and may have even collaborated with them in his earliest dramas.

There was one other association between Kyd and Shakespeare.  Neither had been to university.  As products of only grammar school only, they were both criticised by the "university wits" for their lack of learning.  

It was a small and intense world.  These young dramatists stole lines and characters from one another. The success of The Spanish Tragedy in 1586 seems to have inspired Marlowe to write another play of bombastic eloquence.  The two parts of Tamburlaine were acted at the end of the following year.  They did constitute a revolution in English drama but like other young artists Marlowe quickly acquired notoriety for his life as much for his art. He was generally regarded as an athiest, a blasphemer who had sexual relationships with adolescent boys.  After his success on the stage, he added notorious renegade to the list.  Shakespeare may have kept a personal distance from Marlowe.  Marlowe's reputation always preceded him.  He was generally considered to be mad, bad and dangerous to  know.