Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Chapter 48

So Shaken as We Are.  So Wan with Care

In the summer of 1595 the Lord Chamberlain's Men went to tour.  In June they were at Ipswich and at Cambridge, in each place receiving the not inconsiderable of forty shillings.  There had been a little time when a university town such as Cambridge had shunned the presence of common players, but their status and prestige had risen.  Shakespeare had an eager audience among students.  It is not too much to suggest that he would have been a draw for the members of various colleges.

They had left London because the theatres had been closed again.  There had been food riots in the late spring and early summer, thanks to the soaring costs of fish and putter.  The apprentices had taken over markets in Southwark to sell the staples of food at what they considered an appropriate price.  The pillories in Cheapside had been torn down and a makeshift gallows were erected outside the house of the Lord Mayor.  So London was placed under the Elizabethan version of martial law which meant the theatres were closed.

Shakespeare's acting troupe had begun their career in London during troubled times. The Weavers' apprentices were part of the riots in the summer of 1595, and a silk weaver was thrown in Bedlam for accusing the mayor of insanity.  In A Midsummer Night's Dream Bottom, is himself a weaver.  It has been suggested the Shakespeare was transforming violence into a farce. 

When the company resumed acting in London in August the Lord Mayor demanded that their resident theatres, the Curtain and the Theatre should be pulled down in order to avoid the threatening presence of crowds and disorder in that neighborhood.  The players reputation however were considered of better quality than their work place among the city fathers.  Sir Robert Cecil, member of the Privy Council, asking "your grace to visit Canon Row; where as late as it shall please you a gate for your supper shall be open, and King Richard present himself to your view."  This may allude to the late night performance of The Tragedy of King Richard III but it had generally been referring to The Tragedy of King Richard II that had just been written.  It is a certain respects a contentious play, concerned as it with the forced abdication and murder of a legitimate sovereign, and Cecil may have been invited to check its suitability for the court.  The scenes directly concern with the events that may have been acted within the lifetime of Elizabeth I, but they were never printed.

The censored play was a popular success with three quarto editions printed in the space of two years; the last two of them included name of William Shakespeare as author.

Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of King Richard II in verse, and it was all the splendour of  his lyric impulse.  The verse shimmers and soars as the history of England is mingled with enchantment.  He is the monarch of metaphor and simile.  His is in every sense a wonderful performance.  Richard finds his deepest being while musing upon his role or part within the world.  He is depicted as a highly self-conscious and dramatic monarch; he is the only person in the play to granted soliloquies while his enemy and supplanted, Henry Bolingbroke, remained resolutely unyielding and external.  The declining king seems to grow in interest as he approaches his defeat and death.  Shakespeare become more interested in his temperament and situation.  At the beginning of the play he is somewhat callous but he inspires some of Shakespeare's greatest verse.  It summons up all the grace and sympathy of his nature and in this play he proves himself beyond doubt to the master pathos.

The Lord Chamberlain's Men returned to that court for the Christmas of  1595 about three weeks after their performance at the house of Sir Edward Hoby in Canon Row.  It is not known whether they played Richard II before the ageing queen.  Six years later she told a visitor to Greenwich Palace that "I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?  and complained the tragedy "Was played fortie times in open street and houses."  It is not clear what she meant by "open streets" but by "houses" she must have been alluding to private performances, indirectly providing further evidence that the payers were indeed hired by nobles or rich men.  So, at the very least, she was aware of the play's existence.  Could it have been acted at court at the end of the year?

 which interval they traveled to Rutland.  In the household of Sir John Harington, the Lord Chamberlain's men gave a performance of an old favourite, Titus Andronicus, as part of the New Year celebrations of 1596.  They acted on the evening of their arrival, and left the following day.  Presumably they were well rewarded.  Sir John Harington was an intimate friend of the same Hoby of Canon Row, with whom he had been at Eton.  In addition the French tutor in the household, Monsieur Le Doux, was later financed by the Earl of Essex on various expeditions to the continent as an intelligence agent.

So we have Shakespeare and his company paying an especial favour, or tribute, to one of Essex's affinity.  It reaffirms the suggestion that Shakespeare himself was close to the circle of Essex's supporters, most notable the young Earl of Southampton.  The familial association between Hoby and Cecil renders this whole network of friends and relations even more significant, especially since in this period Essex and the Cecils were on friendly terms.  Shakespeare, if only briefly, was moving in a world of confidential agents and secret missions, of plot and counter-plot.  It was a world that many of his contemporaries.  Christopher Marlowe chief among them, knew very well.  It must have been a world that Shakespeare himself understood.

So there is an air of unfamiliarity, and perhaps mystery, about his appearance in the grand house at Rutland.  It has even been suggested that "Monsieur Le Doux" was a pseudonym for an English secret agent, and perhaps even a pseudonym was a resolutely undead Christopher Marlowe.  On a more prosaic note we may simply record that Jacques Petit said in his letter that “on a aussi joué la tragédie de Titus Andronicus mais la monstre a plus valu que le sujet.”  The "monstre" or spectacle was more interesting than the plot.  The same might be said of this particular gathering.  The stage of Rutland is suddenly lit, and Shakespeare is glimpsed in the company of people with whom he is not ordinarily associated.  If ever there was a "Secret Shakespeare," as a hundred biographies testify, it lies in obscure moments such as these.