Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Chapter 57

No More Words. We Beseech You

By becoming resident playwright of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare had avoided the unhappy fate of those freelance dramatists who lived on their increasingly frayed wits.  There were not many of them and they were all known to each other.  In the manner of such things, Shakespeare would have been the object of scorn and derision as well as probably some envy.  These writers would have been employed by actors or managers of theatres.  The diaries of Philip Henslowe at the Swan reveal that, of the eight-nine plays he supervised, thirty-four were written by a single author and other fifty-five were the result of collaborative enterprise.  In the earlier period the actors themselves had written the plays, so little did the text matter compared to the spectacle and action.

The writer or writers might have proposed, or the story might have been suggested by the actors or theatre managers; they would then work on the “plot” which they would turn into the play itself.  They tended to write in installments, being paid for each stage of their delivery.

It is of great importance to note that these men were the first of their kind.  There were no rules.  There had never existed professional writers before, where the writers were dependent upon the commercial market for their success or failure.

The playwright finished their “sheets” quickly.  It was the literary equivalent of factory farming and Jonson was scorned for spending merely five weeks on a play.  They were called upon to augment or revise exiting plays and to adapt them to different casts and circumstances.  New plays were needed all the time and new kinds of plays were constantly in demand.  Then there was a fashion for Roman plays.  There was a vogue for plays concerned with rulers in disguise.  There was a period when romances and plays containing masques became popular.  Shakespeare himself was not immune to these changes and would make subtle changes to meet the demands of the moment.

That is why play-writing was also considered to the most lucrative employment for the writer of the period.  The average rate for a new play was approximately £6 and popular playwrights were able to compose at least five plays a year.  Their annual income would have been twice as much as they earned as schoolmasters. It was an energetic, boisterous, drunken and occasions violent world that naturally spilled over into the circles of theatrical.

There was no question then creating an eminent “career” out of the writing places for the playhouses.  These men were not established poets Samuel Daniel, patronised by royalty and financed by nobility.  They were journeymen or workmen.  Whether Shakespeare considered himself in this light is an open question.  His pursuit of status in gaining a coat of arms suggests he had higher aspirations, but in actual practice, his trade was no doubt as pragmatic and as workmanlike as any of his contemporaries.

There was none great change in the printing and publication of Shakespeare’s plays.  On 10 March 1598, the volume edition of A Pleasant Conceited Comedie called Loves Labours Lost.  This was the first of his plays in which he announced as the author and heralded the growing importance of his name in the dissemination of his work to the public.  In the same new quarto versions of Richard II and Richard III proclaimed they, unlike their anonymous predecessors, had been composed only by “William Shake-speare.”

The publications of Love’s Labour’s Lost can be seen, however, as a highly significant even in the creation of the modern conception of the writer.  It was not the least of Shakespeare’s accomplishments to elevate and perhaps even create, the status of his commercial author.    The author may have come out of the printing press rather than the theatre, as this narrative suggests, but the literary and cultural identity of the individual writer could no longer be ignored.