Dear Me,

  So now we are on to part four!  Isn't that exciting?!  This part will cover five chapters.  I can't remember what they're about so I guess we'll find out together.

Cheers!

Shakespeare: The Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part Four

Chapter 32: Among the Buzzing Pleased Multitude

Shakespeare followed public taste, but he also helped create it.  He wrote ten plays on the subject of English history and we can infer that it was a subject he loved to write about.  However, as is often the case with literary genius, the imagination of the age helped to inspire him.  This is a sense was the first period of secular history in England.  If human will rather divine providence was the source of significant event, then drama had found a new subject.  It could be said that Shakespeare was present at the invention of human motive and human purpose in English history.

Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York had been published in 1548, and the first edition of Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland followed in 1577.  These were the books that Shakespeare devoured, although he seemed to favour Holinshed's more popular account of the past.  If we wish to see Shakespeare as a characteristically English writer, this appetite for historical re-creation affords some evidence for that identification

By 1591 he was already so successful that he might have been conveying funds to his wife and family.  Whether he appeared in person is another matter.  He may have entrusted his money to a carrier, but the matters of his home town still concerned him,  His father's affairs in particular worried him.  He was thoroughly informed  of his father's decision to file a bill in the late summer of 1588, to get back the house in Wilmcote from their their relative, Edmund Lambert.  The case was meant  to be heard in 1590 but was dropped, only to be revived eight years later.  It has even been suggested that Shakespeare himself may have had to appear at court to further his father's case.  

Shakespeare stayed with Burbage's men at the Theatre, while the rest of Lord Strange's Men left with Alleyn to the Rose.  But in 1592 the future of the London theatre was not all clear or secure for any theatrical company.  At the beginning of June there was a riot among apprentices, who had come to see a play.  The riot spread to the other side of the river and the theatres were closed for three months. In July Lord Strange's Men begged the Privy Council to consider reopening the Rose which threw an interesting light on the condition of all the players at this time.  They were obliged to tour in the country, as a result of the closing of the theatres,  They argued for  for the opening of the Rose as :a greate releif to the poore watermen theare" who had lost their custom.  They were issued their consent the plague was emerging in the city and by so there would be no stage plays during the epidemic.

Burbage's men were in the same condition as their colleague on the other side of the river.  They could not work in London and were obliged to tour the country.  It may have been at this juncture that Burbage sought the patronage of Henry Herbert, the second Earl of Pembroke, to lend an air of respectability to the group of strolling players that included the young Shakespeare.

So we see that Shakespeare was moving from the Queen's Men to Lord Strange's Men and then onward to Pembroke's before he found his final home in the Lord Chamberlain's Men.  It did not mean that he was a freelance but that he followed a fellow actors as one company grew out of another.  He was loyal, as well as immensely hard-working.