Huzzah, chapter 33.
:P
Shakespeare: The Biography
by
Peter Ackroyd
Part Four
Chapter 33: An't Please Your Honor Players
In the summer of 1592 the newly formed Pembroke's Men were obliged to leave London. The available records suggest that the plague that year was particularly bad. The exact route of the late summer tour is not known but there is a record of Pembroke's Men playing at a "stop" in a more extended tour that covered included Coventry, Warwick and Stratford-upon-Avon. We may say with some certainty that Shakespeare was reunited with his family in the summer of 1592.
Shakespeare and his companions traveled in a wagon with baskets containing the costumes and with the essential stage properties. They might manage, at best, approximately thirty miles per day. It was an uncomfortable mode of travelling, but the alternative was to walk. It is possible that some players took their horses with them, but the cost of upkeep on an extended tour was very high. They lodged at inns for the night, and played there for the price of their beds and food. This kind of life did have the virtue of encouraging a sense of brotherhood among the actors. They were an extended family. It may even have become a welcome substitute for his existing one.
They visited some eight towns and thirty noble households, even making the journey up to Edinburgh. This was an important aspect of Shakespeare's experience of the world. In the summer and autumn of 1592 it may have been the only viable means of earning a living.
But Pembroke's Men were not simply a group of travelling players. They were invited to perform before the queen during the Christmas season, a sign of honour for a company so newly formed. Their success may have been connected with the plays which they performed. Among the plays, were The Taming of a Shrew, Titus Andronicus and two plays on the reign of Henry VI. We may conclude that Shakespeare had achieved some renown on his own part, perhaps among is fellows rather than the spectators who flocked to see the plays, not least because he was bitterly attacked this year by Robert Greene.
In the autumn of 1592 Greene's autobiographical pamphlet condemned "that only Shake-scene in a countrey" who "supposes he is able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you." This suggests an element of rivalry and competitiveness in Shakespeare's nature. The "best of you" refers to the university playwrights, among them Marlowe and Nashe. It was a continuation of that war of words which Nashe and Greene had begun three years before.
Greene described his rival as one of "those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours." He is saying that Shakespeare was a player and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. Because the young Shakespeare was one of the few who attained the dual role of actor and playwright, Greene berates him as a "jack-of-all-trades". He also stats that having supplied Shakespeare with lines he had on his death-bed now been "forsaken" He accused Shakespeare of being an unlearned upstart plagiarist.
The charge throws a suggestive light on a little fable that Greene included in his pamphlet, which immediately succeeded the assault upon Shakespeare concerned with the ant and the grasshopper. Greene compared himself to the grasshopper, and we are left to wonder who the ant might be. The ant was prudent and thrifty where the grasshopper was careless and spendthrift.
The charge was again plagiarism, but the ant is also condemned as a "greedy miser". Later in life Shakespeare hoarded essential provisions during times of dirth. He acted as a money lender on certain occasions and he possessed a healthy respect for money.
We are now entering a period when Shakespeare's plays can be securely placed if not precisely dated. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is one of the first of Shakespeare's comedies. It seems to have been written quickly - but then, under the circumstances of the time, all of his plays were composed in this fashion. There are several inconsistencies and contradictions that show evident sign of hast or separate stages of composition. The Emperor suddenly becomes a Duke and two very different characters are given the same name. It has been argued that the comic passages concerning a man and his dog were written at a later date. It is most probable that they were added for the performance of a specific clown - Will Kempe comes to mind - and thus emphasise the extent to which change of cast.
An early date for this play can be guessed from the fact that Shakespeare borrows passages from the fashionable playwrights from the 1580s, He takes character and dialogue from John Lyly, a romantic plot from Robert Greene, and lines from Thomas Kyd. It could be argued that heavily indebted to it.
From the evidence of the play the young writer is half in love with music which shows a distinct technical knowledge, and he is already enamoured of the sonnet form. He places romance and farce so close together that they cannot be distinguished; the lover is followed by the clown and the clown's affection for his dog seems stronger than that of the romantic rivals' to their mistress. We will come to recognise that Shakespeare was not a sentimental person. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona action in the world is subtly confused with play acting. The play also evinces immenese verbal resource, with the principal characters trying out various forms of address with the sole intention of displaying the dramatist's own skills.
It seems almost inevitable that he turned Quickly to The Comedy of Errors, another comedy in a hurry. The Comedy of Errors is a nutty play about suspected madness and mistaken identity, with two sets of twins being continually misrecognised to farcical effect. Shakespeare went back to his earliest dramatic reading but characteristically goes a stage further in complication and intrigue. It is in terms of structure, it is a perfectly "correct" Roman play.
So The Comedy of Errors is for him and exercise in ingenuity as much as in comedy. In that respect it requires a writer of the highest intelligence and sensitivity to maintain the pace and direction of the action. It has the distinction of being Shakespeare's shortest play, but it is not without it subtleties of characterization. We see what might be called the natural bent of Shakespeare's imagination, with the superiority of servants over their master and the natural good sense of women contrasted with the wilful obtuseness of men. There also appears the theme of self-divison that runs through much of Shakespeare's mature drama:
The charge throws a suggestive light on a little fable that Greene included in his pamphlet, which immediately succeeded the assault upon Shakespeare concerned with the ant and the grasshopper. Greene compared himself to the grasshopper, and we are left to wonder who the ant might be. The ant was prudent and thrifty where the grasshopper was careless and spendthrift.
The charge was again plagiarism, but the ant is also condemned as a "greedy miser". Later in life Shakespeare hoarded essential provisions during times of dirth. He acted as a money lender on certain occasions and he possessed a healthy respect for money.
We are now entering a period when Shakespeare's plays can be securely placed if not precisely dated. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is one of the first of Shakespeare's comedies. It seems to have been written quickly - but then, under the circumstances of the time, all of his plays were composed in this fashion. There are several inconsistencies and contradictions that show evident sign of hast or separate stages of composition. The Emperor suddenly becomes a Duke and two very different characters are given the same name. It has been argued that the comic passages concerning a man and his dog were written at a later date. It is most probable that they were added for the performance of a specific clown - Will Kempe comes to mind - and thus emphasise the extent to which change of cast.
An early date for this play can be guessed from the fact that Shakespeare borrows passages from the fashionable playwrights from the 1580s, He takes character and dialogue from John Lyly, a romantic plot from Robert Greene, and lines from Thomas Kyd. It could be argued that heavily indebted to it.
From the evidence of the play the young writer is half in love with music which shows a distinct technical knowledge, and he is already enamoured of the sonnet form. He places romance and farce so close together that they cannot be distinguished; the lover is followed by the clown and the clown's affection for his dog seems stronger than that of the romantic rivals' to their mistress. We will come to recognise that Shakespeare was not a sentimental person. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona action in the world is subtly confused with play acting. The play also evinces immenese verbal resource, with the principal characters trying out various forms of address with the sole intention of displaying the dramatist's own skills.
It seems almost inevitable that he turned Quickly to The Comedy of Errors, another comedy in a hurry. The Comedy of Errors is a nutty play about suspected madness and mistaken identity, with two sets of twins being continually misrecognised to farcical effect. Shakespeare went back to his earliest dramatic reading but characteristically goes a stage further in complication and intrigue. It is in terms of structure, it is a perfectly "correct" Roman play.
So The Comedy of Errors is for him and exercise in ingenuity as much as in comedy. In that respect it requires a writer of the highest intelligence and sensitivity to maintain the pace and direction of the action. It has the distinction of being Shakespeare's shortest play, but it is not without it subtleties of characterization. We see what might be called the natural bent of Shakespeare's imagination, with the superiority of servants over their master and the natural good sense of women contrasted with the wilful obtuseness of men. There also appears the theme of self-divison that runs through much of Shakespeare's mature drama:
...oh how comes it
That thou art then estranged from they selfe? (500-1)
The fact that these lines are uttered by a wife, who believes that she has been abandoned by her husband, In this play a family is reunited after many vicissitudes, and lost children are restored.
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