ALIVE!

.\MER1CAS FOREMOST THEATER PRODUCER BRINGS

ELIZABETH KIRKLAND
Joseph Papp, one of the most important forces in theater
today, is the founder and producer of the New York Shake-
speare Festival, America's largest and most prolific the-
atrical institution. Since 1954, Mr. Papp has produced or
directed all but one of Shakespeare's plays, in Central Park,
in schools, off and on Broadway, and at the Festival's
permanent home. The Public Theater. He has also pro-
duced such award-winning plays and musical works as
Hair, A Chorus Line, For Colored Girls Who Have Consid-
ered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, and Runaways,
among many others.

Elizabeth Kirkland graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe

in Classics in 1 983 and earned a master's degree in English
as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. She has been involved in
the theater backstage as a producer, publicity manager,
and stage manager, and onstage as a performer. She now
works with Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare
Festival.
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2010

http://www.archive.org/details/shakespearealiveOOpapp
 !

SHAKESPEARE
ALIVE
Joseph Papp
AND
Elizabeth
KiRKLAND

n
®
BANTAM BOOKS
NEW YORK 'TORONTO LONDON SYDNEY AUCKLAND
• • •
 !

SHAKESPEASE ALIVE
A Bantam Book I February 1988

Cover photographs, clockwise from left comer are fi-om New York Shakespeare Festival
productions:

Othello with Raul Mia as Othello and Richard Dreyftiss as lago, directed by WUford Leach
,

at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, 1979.

Photo €> Martha Swope

Richard HI, with Kevin Kline as Richard III, directed by Jane Howell at the Delacorte
Theater in Central Park, 1983.
Photo © Martha Swope
A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Kathleen Widdoes as Titania, Albert Quinton as Nick
Bottom, and Ralph Hoffman and Herman Dalkieth Howell as fairies, directed by Joel J.
Friedman in 1961 at the Wollman Memorial Rink in Central Park, 1961.
Photo © George E. Joseph

King Lear, with James Earl Jones as Lear and Tom Aldredge as the Fool, directed by Edwin
Sherin at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, 1973.
Photo George E. Joseph ©
Two Gentlemen of Verona, with (I. to r.) Deborah Rush as Silvia, Dylan Baker as Launce,
Thomas Gibson as Proteus, and Elizabeth McGovem as Julia, directed by Stuart Vaughan
at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, 1987.
Photo © Martha Swope
Twelfth Night, with F. Murray Abraham as Malvolio and Peter MacNicol as Sir Andre,
directed by Wilford Leach at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, 1986.
Photo © Martha Swope
Henry IV, Part One, with Stacy Keach as Sir John Falstaff. directed by Gerald Freedman at
the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, 1968.
Photo © George E. Joseph

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Copyright ©
7955 by New York Shakespeare Festival.
Cover © 7955 by Mark English.
illustration copyright
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'

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book originated in the mind of my wife

and colleague Gail Merrifield Papp. My thanks to her for
her assistance and for those long nights we spent together
reviewing Elizabeth Kirkland's completed manuscript. I
alsowould like to thank Linda Grey, Bantam's publisher,
and Kathy Robbins, my agent, for their support.
— Joseph Papp
I WOULD LIKE to thank the many who helped along the
way, beginning with Peter Conrad, of Christ Church, Oxford,
who not only taught but inspired. I am grateful to Jeremy
Maule of Trinity College, Cambridge; Peter Holland of
Trinity Hall, Cambridge; David Norbrook and Oliver Taplin,
both of Magdalen College, Oxford; Emrss Jones of New
College, Oxford; Julia Briggs of Hertford College, Oxford;
Nigel Smith of Keble College, Oxford; and Christopher
Butler of Christ Church, Oxford, all of whom provided
helpful suggestions at the outset of this project. Dick McCaw
of The Medieval Players in London offered hands-on advice
from his perspective, as did Estelle Parsons and the
company of Shakespeare on Broadway from theirs.
In addition to Martin Segal, whose early advice is still
appreciated, special thanks go to the staff of the Archives
Office and all others at the New York Shakespeare Festival
who helped; and to Nessa Rapoport and Linda Loewenthal
at Bantam Books. Daniel Benjamin made helpful comments
and corrections on the first six chapters. Alan Fine gave
hours of criticism and advice; my gratitude to him goes
far beyond this. And finally, to my parents, deep thanks
for making it all possible.

— Elizabeth Kirkland
 1

CONTENTS

Part I: Prologue 1

Chapter 1 One Day at a Time: What Daily

Life Was Like 3

Part IL- The Elizabethans 15

Chapter 2 Order in the Court:

The Renaissance 17
Chapter Elizabethan Star Wars:
3
Superstition and the Supernatural 32
Chapter 4 Don't Talk to Strangers:
Foreigners and Immigrants in England 48
Chapter 5 Like a Virgin: Queen Elizabeth
and the Status of Women 6o
Chapter 6 The Ties That Bind: Family Life 85

Part IIL Shakespeare Alive! 103

Chapter 7 The Revolution of 1576:
The Theatre Is Born 105
Chapter 8 In Good Company: The
Sixteenth-Century Acting Companies 1 2
Chapter 9 Getting Their Acts Together:
Playwright and Audience 1 36
Chapter 10 From Page to Stage: Producing
A Play in the Sixteenth Century 146
Chapter 1 1 Sources and Resources 153
Chapter 12 English as a Foreign Language 164
Chapter 13 Shakespeare Alive? 177

Bibliography 193
 PART I

Prologue
 Autolycus, a peddler, gloats at the success of his
business as he traverses the countryside selling
trinkets and ballads. (Roscoe Lee Browne as
Autolycus in the 1963 New York Shakespeare Festival
production of The Winter's Tale.)
Photo: George E. Joseph
 CHAPTER 1

One Day at a
Time: What Daily
Life Was Like

Give Us This Day Our

Daily Bread

You ARE LIVING in England in the late years of the sixteenth

centun Like most people, you live with your family in
.

the countryside, eking out a meager existence as best you

can. If you're lucky, your father is a yeoman farmer who
owns enough land to support his family, or a "husband-
man" who has less property but supplements his income
by wage-earning.
The land you live in is full of contradictions. A woman,
Queen Elizabeth, rules the nation, while within the family,
men still rule women. A highly-educated elite enjoys the
fruits of literature, while many people can't even read. The
government invests huge sums of money in voyages of
exploration and wars with other nations, while science
and medicine remain in an appallingly primitive state. In
London, the royal Court glitters with jewels and finery,
while miserv' reigns in rural hovels. Rich young men wan-
der around Europe for fun, while in England, thousands
of homeless people wander from parish to parish, begging
and stealing to survive.
The gap between the rich and the poor jee ms to have
^wi^fined^n the 1^/Us and 15«0s; wealtlfand power are
 !

SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

concentrated in the hands of the few, and many people

can't even find a job.
You come from a family of laborers. You don't have
much land at all, hardly even a vegetable garden you can
call your own, and you are completely dependent on what-
ever wages you can get by harvesting other people's crops
and doing odd jobs around the village. There is no money
for such "extras" as education or nice clothes or red meat.
In fact, your father's daily income, even when combined
with yours, barely covers the cost of feeding you and your
brothers and sisters; thank goodness your mother is able
to bring in a few extra pennies from her spinning.
There's no doubt about it, life is a struggle even in the
best of circumstances. Of course, usually circumstances
aren't anywhere near the best. Disease, malnutrition, and
your daily existence
tragic natural disasters are givens of
and keep you from taking anything you have for granted.
Just a month ago, for example, an old widow's thatched
roof caught on fire, and even though you were right there
along with everyone else in the village, pulling the flaming
thatch down with iron hooks, it was too late. Her cottage
burned to the ground, and she, too, is now among the
—
homeless and hopeless.
Your dependent status as a tenant makes your perch
in life still more precarious. To an unjust and unscrupu-
lous landlord, g rofit is mo re important than^principjes,
and yours feelslTo~Qbhgarron to look out toryour best
interests. If he decides to "enclose" the land—to stop using
it for farming and turn it into grazing pastures for sheep

— he has endless means of forcing you out: he might make

you give up your lease, or renew it only at great expense,
or, most commonly, charge you exorbitant rent.
While your family has been struggling against these
odds and worrying about how to make ends meet from
day to day, larger forces have been at work that are going
to affect you drastically. First, England has been undergo-
ing a huge increase in population. The two-and-a-half mil-
lion English people who were alive when your grandparents
were bom will practically have doubled by the time your
grandchildren die. This unprecedented population growth
isalready being translated into inflated prices, as too many
people chase after scarce resources. It also means that
 —
ONE DAY AT A TIME: WHAT DAILY LIFE WAS LIKE

wages stay unacceptably low; with so many laborers on

the job market, farmers and other employers can easily
find people willing to work for the pathetically low wages
they offer if you're not interested.
Getting and spending have been a constant battle, and
staying on the winning side has depended on plentiful
harvests, which bring the twofold benefit of jobs and low
grain prices. But in recent years the battle has become a
losing one: the hea\y rains of the last two summers have
ruined the han'ests, the population has been growing faster
than the crops, and famine has begun to cast its long, thin
shadow across your life.
—
Grain whether you eat the oatmeal cakes of northern
England or the coarse wheat bread of the southerners
is a staple of your diet and, if you have no land and have
to buy all your grain on the market, your single biggest
expense. When prices shoot up, as they do in bad han-est
years, it spells disaster for many a citizen; the Carriers
in Shakespeare's Henry- IV Part 1 remember a comrade
who "never joyed since the price of oats rose. It was the
death of him." You tr\' to find cheaper kinds of grain
than your usual wheat, supplementing your diet with
stomach-filling peas and beans —
but even the prices of
these are rising now, and you begin to realize, horrif\'ing
though it is, that there aren't many alternatives. Stanation
seems inevitable.
You wonder how you and your family are going to cope
with the steady advance of such hunger, the hair falling
out and the skin turning gray and the bleak prospect of
watching your fellow villagers "staning and dying in our
streets and in the fields [because] of lack of bread," as a
contemporars' in the northern town of Newcastle writes.
Little do you know that the famine has darkened all
of Europe, not just England. In Sweden, old women have
reportedly been found dead in the fields with seeds and
grass in their mouths, and in far-off Hungarv, Tartar women
are rumored to have eaten their own children!
To make matters worse, there has been an economic
recession too, mainly because of a slump in the cloth trade
that your mother had been depending on for her liveli-
hood. Many people rely on the cloth and wool trades for
their living, and now, "the deadness of that trade and want
 !

SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

of money is such that they are for the most part without
work, and know not how to hve," as an official of one
parish reports.

Hitting the Road

Clearly, the situation is getting desperate. After a lot of

agonizing, you decide that your only hope is to leave your
family and village and migrate to London. "After all," you
think, "it be one less mouth for them to feed. And
will
maybe I'll an apprenticeship or something."
find
Anything would be better than staying here and slowly
starving to death. And so you say goodbye to your parents,
kiss your little sister on the head, punch your brother in
the arm, and head off to the big city —
not roaring down
the interstate highway on a Greyhound bus, as future gen-
erations of teenagers will do, but tnjdging along a dirt
track on foot. At least it's not winter, when the quagmires
of mud and hundreds of ruts and holes make the roads
impassable. They're not in good repair as it is, and prog-
ress is slow and uneven.
Once you've reached the slightly larger London road,
you find yourself being passed by wealthier travelers who
can afford to ride on horseback. They are traveling at a
leisurely enough pace now, but no doubt as the afternoon
wears on they will pick up speed in order to reach one of
the fashionable inns for the rich before nightfall; as Shake-
speare observes in Macbeth, "Now spurs the lated traveler
apace To gain the timely inn."
You're surprised at how many people are on the road,
especially given the discomfort of traveling. A few well-
heeled young gents are headed for the university life at
Oxford and Cambridge. Important-looking government
officials gallop by on their swift post-horses. Most often,
though, you see other pedestrians, for walking is the poor
person's method of transportation, and there are lots of
poor people on the move. Apparently you weren't the only
—
one with the idea of going to London the roads seem to
be flooded with migrants like you.
As you strike up conversations with a few of your fellow
 ONE DAY AT A TIME: WHAT DAILY LIFE WAS LIKE

walkers, you realize that everyone has a different story to

tell. You meet an unwed and very pregnant servant girl
who was fired from her job and kicked out of her parish
when her pregnancy could no longer be hidden; she's been
wandering for several weeks, hoping to find a parish that
will take her in without a husband. A middle-aged man is
going to give evidence in court. A newly-married young
couple are on their way to visit relatives.
You also run into a peddler who, like Autolycus in
Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale, travels around the
countryside, stopping at fairs and markets to sell his as-
sortment of wares: gloves, bracelets, perfumes, pins and
needles, and ballads. "Come buy of me, come. Come buy,
come buy," he cries persuasively. "Buy, lads, or else your
lasses cry."
The most depressing sight on the road is the old people,
and lame, who are "forced to walk the coun-
sick, decrepit,
try from place to place" because there isn't any organized
system of hospitals, shelters, or charitable institutions to
take care of them. As a contemporary social critic writes,
many of them, as they are driven from one parish to an-
other, just die, "some in ditches, some in holes, some in
caves and dens, some in fields .like dogs."
. .

The majority of wanderers you run into, however, are

solitary young men about your age who are traveling, like
you, in the hope of finding work. Three amiable youths
ask you to join up with them, but you decide that your
chances of finding something are better if you're alone,
so you thank them but turn down their invitation. If three
is a crowd, four is an unemployment line.
At all times you keep an eye out for anyone who looks
vaguely "official," for you don't have the required papers
that state where and why you are traveling. If you're caught
without them, you'll be in a lot of trouble; as an unofficial
traveler, you are considered a vagrant, a vagabond in —
short, an undesirable.
The prevailing opinion in government circles seems to
be that vagrants are idle and lazy by choice, or even dan-
gerous. From what you can tell, this is absurd. Of course
there are a few pickpockets and petty thieves among the
travelers, but most of them are like that old woman you
saw picking the pocket of a sleeping man because she had
—
no shoes for her feet hardiv a violent criminal! The fact
 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

is, of course, that with the famine and the trade depres-
sion, the majority of these people couldn't find work if
they wanted to. And even if they could, their wages would
hardly be enough to live on. For most of the people you
meet, London is their only hope.

The City That Never Sleeps

One hundred miles and several days later, as the sun

comes up, London also rises above the green fields. As
you enter the city gates, you draw your breath in wonder.
—
The city you have come to the largest in all of Europe
— is noisy and bustling. At its heart is the River Thames,
the center of trade and social life. You see the opulent
state barge of the queen moored on the bank and marvel
at how many "watermen," the taxi drivers of the river, are
rowing from one riverbank to the other. You get lost in
the narrow winding streets; as you stare up at the looming
Tower of London, you are nearly run over by one of the
many coaches that are causing perpetual gridlock in the
city. You hear vendors hawking "hot peas!" or "new brooms,
green brooms!"; their voices mix with the pitiful moans
and cries of the prisoners in the Tower to create a deaf-
ening and exhausting hubbub. It is hard to believe how
many people live here — well over 100,000.
Although you're slightly overwhelmed by it all, you
decide to do what you came here for and begin looking
for work. Unfortunately, everyone else is doing the same
— the market is saturated with laborers, and prospects are
not good. Most days you just sit around hoping something
will come your way. You wonder what will become of you.
There isn't any formal system of welfare to support the
unemployed, no food stamps, no soup kitchens.
Together with other migrants just like you, you huddle
in a cold attic and share memories of what each of you
has left behind. You yourself recall the small stone cottage
that you lived in all of your life. Although it was only one
room, and what little furniture you had was very rough,
although your bed was of straw and your sheets were of
 ONE DAY AT A TIME: WHAT DAILY LIFE WAS LIKE

canvas — still, it was home, and it was better than this

smelly tenement where all of you are sleeping on the floor.

An old man in the room, once the senant of a pros-
perous farmer, describes the opulent house of his former
—
employer so many rooms, and carpets on the floor, woven
tapestries on the walls, carved oak woodwork, lots of can-
dles giving light, and the ultimate luxurv —
feather beds.
He remembers serving his first Christmas dinner at the
house, at the long table in the great hall, or dining room.
He'd never seen so much meat on one table beef, pork, —
veal, venison, game. There were oysters and eel, cabbage
and carrots, some delicious finely-ground bread, dried fruit,
and wines imported from the French or German countrv-
side. As you listen to his description, you wonder how the
rich aren't chronically constipated with all that meat.
In your own little cottage the fare was usually coarse
brown bread, cheese and eggs, the occasional chicken or
hunk of bacon. Everything used to be cheap two loaves —
of bread for a penny —
but in the last few wretched years,
prices have risen enormously and food for the poor like
you has become scarce. With the onset of famine you had
to resort to eating bread (still a staple), peas and beans,
and whatever else you could hunt up in the woods around
the village.
—
Two would-be apprentices fresh from the alehouse
— tumble into the already crowded room, singing the praises
of beer. Indeed, the constant friend of all of you during
these times of tribulation is beer. Imported wines are too
costly; tea and coffee are still luxuries; but beer is cheap
to make and a regular feature of social life. Everyone drinks
it, even your young brothers and sisters back in the village.

Sometimes, admittedly, people go overboard at local fairs —

and country markets, scores of people regularly end up
lying dead drunk in the field.
And drinking seems to provide the same comfort here
in London. The alehouses are always full; you can find one
on nearly ever\' comer. A Frenchman was provoked to
remark that no business could be done in England with-
out pots of beer. But the truth is that alcohol helps people
forget the strains of life. It flows freely in the prisons and
during outbreaks of the plague. At public executions the
person condemned to death is alwavs offered a drink. You
10 SHAKESPEARE alive!

can understand why. A beer or two eases the hardships

of daily existence — the lack of jobs, the high prices, the
scarcity of food, the awful diseases, and all the other things
that make life so hard.
Indeed, sickness and death are regular features of life
in this enormous city you've come to. Disease is even more
prevalent here and in the squalid suburbs you passed on
your way into London than in the impoverished village
you left behind. The contagious bubonic plague is the
number one killer. Coming in at a close second is small-
pox, which blinds or disfigures the people it doesn't ac-
tually kill; your beautiful little sister has been left pock-
marked for life. And tuberculosis takes lives daily.
The spread of infectious diseases is furthered by the
total ignorance about personal and public hygiene. Rich
and poor alike don't bathe verv' often; the poor can't afford
the high price of soap and don't have the facilities. The
toothbrush won't come on the scene for another seventy
years. Most Elizabethans, and you are no exception, have
bad breath, rotting teeth, constant stomach disorders, and
scabs or running sores all over their skin.
Things are no better on a public scale. The city ditches
are used as toilets. Butchers throw dead animal carcasses
into the street to rot. Housewives nonchalantly toss putrid
garbage into the river. Poor people are buried in mass
graves, and the bodies of the rich, lying beneath the church
building in burial vaults, force the congregation to evac-
uate because the stench of decomposition is so strong.
Not even trained doctors make a connection between
these unhygienic conditions and the high incidence of
disease. Medical care is not very advanced, and knowledge
of the human body is still very primitive. The prevailing
theory of illness is that it is a result of an imbalance in
the four humors, the four chief fluids of the human body.
Health requires a perfect balance of bile, phlegm, choler,
and blood; when any one of these becomes excessive, a
doctor tries to restore the balance by using leeches to suck
out some of the sick person's blood. X rays and stetho-
scopes haven't yet been invented; the most common op-
eration is amputation, performed without anesthesia. In
the city of London there are two hospitals and one doctor
for every five thousand people. Health insurance such as
 — 1

ONE DAY AT A TIME: WHAT DAILY LIFE WAS LIKE 1

Medicare or Medicaid doesn't exist, which means that doc-

tors are prettymuch only for the wealthy. In your opinion,
doctors are more likely to kill than cure, and you're prob-
ably better off consulting a faith healer, good witch, or
wise woman who uses techniques of white magic.

While medical knowledge remains in a fairly backward

education is expanding prodigiously. But
state, liberal arts
you yourself only got as far as basic reading skills at the
village school. You weren't able to go to grammar school,
the linchpin of the Elizabethan educational system, be-
cause your parents couldn't spare you from work in the
fields. Although they had more schools to choose from,
they couldn't afford the books, papers, and candles you'd
have needed. To them, school seemed a luxury.
But what you can't experience, you can hear about
from the down-at-the-heels scholar sitting next to you in
the cold room, reminiscing fondly about his old school-
days. The morning session went from 6 a.m. to 1 1 a.m.,
with a two-hour lunch break; the afternoon session was
—
from 1 P.M. to 6 p.m. six days a week! Grammar school
education made available to upper-class boys the wealth
of Latin literature uncovered by Renaissance scholars
playwrights such as Plautus, Terence, Seneca; the poets
Virgil and Horace; and prose writers such as Cicero and
Caesar. A lot was demanded of the pupils; and if any boy
was lazy or inattentive, he might be whipped, sometimes
savagely, by the schoolmaster.
Status-conscious families felt compelled to send their
sons to school in order to prepare them for a career in
politics or the Church. Only in the highest reaches of the
aristocracy was any money spent on educating girls. Your
queen, Elizabeth, for example, is an extremely accom-
plished speaker of Latin, Greek, French, and Italian. But
she is certainly the exception.
Still, you don't have to be a queen or a scholar to learn
about the world around you. Recent developments in com-
munications have made literature more accessible to those,
like you, who can at least read. The printing press, brought
to England in the late fifteenth century by a man named
William Caxton, has enabled a lot of people to share in
the riches of the Renaissance. Books, once the sole prov-
 2 !

1 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

ince of the wealthy, are now not only available but af-
fordable. Translations of ancient classical and modem
European writers are proliferating wildly.
There are also hundreds of devotional tracts on the
—
market, and Bibles are everywhere the most popular book
in the nation. Of course, newspapers won't be invented
until the eighteenth century, but topical pamphlets and
broadside ballads are gobbled up by news-hungry Lon-
doners.
News travels more slowly to the rest of the country.
There are only four or five major roads in all of England.
The roads connecting smaller towns and villages are just
dirt tracks, frequented by bands of robbers. Even though
the penalty for highway robbery is death, bandits continue
to rob the rich (and leave the poor alone). The most fa-
mous highwayman in English legend is, of course, Robin
Hood; you know the stories about him and his band of
merry men and his love Maid Marian backward and for-
ward.
within England is limited, foreign travel is even
If travel
more it is almost exclusively for the rich. Gentlemen
so, as
consider it necessary to their education and often aspire
to study in a foreign university in Italy or France.
In order to go abroad, a license, similar to a passport,
must first be obtained. Once a gentleman arrives in Eu-
rope, he speaks Latin, the universal language in educated
circles.
But not everyone who travels abroad is in pursuit of
higher education. Acting companies tour the Continent
and are very popular there, even though they speak Eng-
lish. Merchants and traders are frequent travelers, too.
And as the ex-soldier across the room can attest, the
fourth group that gets the chance to see foreign lands is
the military. Although there isn't a permanent army that
drafts and trains young men, English troops are constantly
engaged in campaigns in Ireland, France, and elsewhere.
—
This fellow spent some time and lost an arm on the —
battlefields of the Low Countries (or the Netherlands), in
the Earl of Essex's campaign. There is a permanent nav^,
albeit a small one, whose expeditions make talk of foreign
lands a part of Londoners' everyday conversation. Military
service might seem like a good opportunity for unem-
ployed men like you, but it is in fact extremely unpopular,
 ONE DAY AT A TIME: WHAT DAILY LIFE WAS LIKE 13

and the grizzled veteran tells you why. The queen pays
her soldiers only ver\ grudgingly. And conditions are bad:
the typical daily na\y rations are a dr>' stale biscuit, some
mouldy cheese, and sour beer. For all these reasons it is
difficuh to keep the militarv' adequately manned. Often
the ranks are filled with ex-convicts and disreputable sorts.
And underhanded methods are used to press men into
sendee. Just last Easter, when the church was more full
than usual, army officers unexpectedly locked the church
doors and walked through the aisles signing up everv' able-
bodied man inside.

Playtime

The constant warfare conducted outside of England is

matched by the constant violence within its borders. Fights,
brawls, and riots erupt at the drop of a hat. On the London
streets you've gotten used to hearing the cry- "Clubs!" which
means a fight is breaking out somew^here. Favorite weap-
ons in these street fights are daggers, swords, and old
reliable fists. The police force that would be controlling
this violence today is all but non-existent; the London
constables are petty and incompetent, utterly incapable
of maintaining order. Even the activities you regard as
"fun" are brutal by later standards. The leading national
amusements are bearbaiting, in which several dogs are
loosed on a bear tied to a stake, and cockfighting, gladia-
torial contests between trained roosters that involve a good
deal of blood.
Public executions are also popular. The convicted
criminal often sits in a cart with a noose around his neck
and is left hanging as it rides away; sometimes his friends
pull at his legs to relieve him of his suffering. Death by
the axe is even gorier, of course; it can often take two or
three chops before the victim is dead. Then the execu-
tioner holds up the head for all to see. Witch-burnings are
increasingly popular and always gruesome.
You prefer bearbaiting and spend many a Sunday af-
ternoon across the river watching the dogs savagely bite
and growl as the bear tosses and tugs in a rage. Recently,
14 SHAKESPEARE alive!

another activity has come to your notice, thanks to an

attic mate who shares your floor — dramatic performances
held in the pubHc theater. He hopes to sign on with an
acting company as a hired man and goes to the theater
often. After talking with him for a while, you think you'll
probably go along. With an admission price of a penny,
it doesn't cost any more than the bearbaiting — and may
be just as much fun. You once saw a band of traveling
players in a nearby village, putting on a play about Noah
and his wife, but a performance in one of these outdoor
public theaters must be a different experience altogether.
Maybe you'll even see a play by William Shakespeare, whose
hometown of Stratford isn't too far from your old village.
You idly wonder if this Shakespeare is really as good
as people say he is. Even if he's not, you think to yourself
as you curl up on the floor in your crowded, wretched little
attic, seeing a play may turn out to be a great way for you
to forget about your worries for an hour or two. Certainly
you have enough of them.
And yet, for all your troubles, you wouldn't go back to
your village. You sense that a world your parents have
never imagined is unfolding around you, and all you want
is to be part of it.
 PART II

The Elizabethans

^'

/ ^
'

1 4

1
ICing Henr\' V, with strategic diplomatic alliances and
territorial gains on mind, attempts to win over
his
the Princess of France to their already-arranged
marriage. (Mer\l Streep and Paul Rudd as Katherine
and Henr\' in the 1 976 New York Shakespeare
Festival production of King Henry- V.)
Photo: George E. Joseph
 CHAPTER 2

Order in the
Court: The
Renaissance

Today WE use the term "Renaissance" (meaning "rebirth")

to describe the incredible flowering of art, scholarship, and
hterature that took place as fifteenth- and sixteenth-cen-
turv Europe blossomed forth from the Middle Ages. The
"Reformation" is the name given to the landmark religious
movement that began when King Heniy VTII split with
the Pope and the Catholic Church of Rome and founded
the Protestant Church of England. And we include the
many exciting geographical and scientific discoveries and
the expansion of trade and commerce of that era in the
phrases "the Age of Exploration" or "the Age of Discover}."
But it occur to the inhabitants of England in the
didn't
late part of the sixteenth centuiy that they were living in
the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Exploration,
or any other such tidy historical period. From their close-
up perspective, the developments and discoveries were
specific to their lifetimes, not part of wider historical
movements. All they knew was that when they looked
around, things seemed to be changing at a bewildering
pace.
The world was opening up, and the possibilities were
wonderful, if a little overwhelming. The recently redis-
covered Greek and Roman writings were taking the book
market by stoiTn, unleashing a new enthusiasm for edu-
cation. Explorers were disco\ ering worlds where everyone
used to think nothing existed. And although the English
 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

were still deeply religious, the institution of the Church

had been seesawing at a dizzying rate during the past
decades. There were so many choices in learning and be-
lief that it must have been tempting to brush them all
aside with one impatient, anxious motion and stick to the
old ways.

The Bestseller List

The intellectual spirit of the Renaissance was com-

pletely changing people's way of looking at life and at
themselves. This movement began in the fourteenth cen-
tury in Italy, then the intellectual center of Europe with
major universities at Bologna and Padua; in The Taming
of the Shrew Lucentio calls the city "fair Padua, nursery
of the arts." When Italian scholars began to look into the
long-buried works of ancient authors such as Homer and
Hesiod, Plato and Aristotle, Virgil and Ovid, they were
unknowingly releasing a vigorous life-force into the blood-
stream of Western culture.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church had domi-
nated civilization, and both literature and education had
been considered servants of religion. In those days literary
works were judged only by how "Christian" they were; not
surprisingly, most "pagan" writings of the Greeks and
Romans — the ancient classics of Plato, Sophocles, and the
like — were forced out of circulation.
When scholars rediscovered them, it wasn't long before
Italy was ablaze with interest in the classical culture that
inspired these writers. Knowledge broke out of the clois-
ters to the freedom of an increasingly secular society. And
the world of the human spirit that had been so long un-
dervalued burst into flames, fanned by the rich colors and
sensuous shapes of painters and sculptors such as Titian,
Raphael, and Michelangelo, and the rich narratives and
romantic epics of Boccaccio, Tasso, and Ariosto.
This cultural explosion eventually reverberated in En-
gland, although it took nearly a century to make itself
heard. When it did, however, echoes of the new "human-
ism" reached the remotest parts of the nation. Education,
 9

ORDER IN THE COURT: THE RENAISSANCE 1

formerly dominated by clergymen, became a prestigious

possession of the upper classes and an indispensable qual-
ification for the "good life." There was a rash of schools
founded all across the nation, with the result that the
riches of the Renaissance became available to more and
more people. Translations of ancient Greco-Roman and
contemporary' Italian authors became bestsellers, aided
by the arrival of the printing press from Europe. Of the
many works on the market, the heroic epics of the Greek
poet Homer (the Odyssey and the Iliad) and the Roman
Virgil (the Aeneid) were considered the highest achieve-
ments of ancient literature for their combination of ac-
tion-packed stories with instruction in Christian moral
virtues such as courage, loyalty, and patience.
But contemporary Italian works weren't slighted by
English printers and publishers either: the pastoral poems
of Sannazarro, for example, influenced the courtier Sir Philip
Sidney in his famous work The Arcadia. Handbooks of
manners and self-help books for ambitious courtiers, such
as Thomas Hoby's translation of The Courtier by Baldas-
sare Castiglione, were well-thumbed by those in Court
circles most anxious to get ahead. Many such books set
forth the ideal of the "Renaissance man," as we call it: a
widely-accomplished man who was statesman and athlete,
scientist and poet, philosopher, courtier, and soldier all
rolled into one.

Which Way Is Up?

These hundreds of old books in new translations coupled

with the explosion in education were certainly broadening
the Elizabethans' literary horizons. Meanwhile, literal ho-
rizons were expanding with an almost frightening rapid-
ity. European astronomers were challenging age-old beliefs
about the universe. One of them, Copernicus, even went
so far as to suggest that the Sun, and not the Earth, was
the center of the universe; he further maintained that the
Earth was actually in motion, not fixed in place. Although
such theories sound elementary to us now, at the time
they ran contrary to everything people had ever thought
20 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

about the centrality of the Earth. Suddenly they were being

told that instead of being the focus of God's attention, the
Earth was just a small lonely planet orbiting the sun. Skep-
ticswere numerous and loud. But as the telescope revo-
lutionized astronomy and an Italian named Galileo
discovered even more unsettling truths about the universe,
the Elizabethans' old assumptions had to give way, even
though it seemed that the sky above their heads was crum-
bling.
The ground beneath their feet was none too steady
either, thanks to the crowd of explorers who were racing
all over the globe propelled by better maps, new mathe-
matical tables, and other advances in technology. As one
writer enthusiastically crowed, "The sea yields to the world
by this art of arts, navigation."
And the world was yielding to adventurous explorers
of all the European nations as they sailed off in search of
wealth and fame. The race was on to discover and —
—
claim sea-routes to the phenomenal storehouses of wealth
in the East. The Portuguese won the first lap when Vasco
da Gama sailed around the southern tip of Africa and
discovered an eastern route to India. Other nations turned
west instead to find a throughway to the East. After Amer-
igo Vespucci ran into Brazil in the southwest and John
Cabot found Newfoundland in the northwest, it began to
dawn on geographers that there was an entire continent
in the way —which might prove valuable in itself. Spain
wasted no time exploring and exploiting this possibility:
explorers such as Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and
Hernando de Soto traipsed up the Pacific coast and around
the southern areas of the place they called America.
The English didn't just sit idly by while all this was
taking place, but eagerly pursued their own avenues of
discovery and trade. Such heroes as Martin Frobisher,
Hugh Willoughby, the Cabot family, and John Davis tried
repeatedly to establish a northeast and then a northwest
passage to Asia. After encouraging starts, all of them were
ultimately unsuccessful, defeated by storms and solid blocks
of ice. But English explorers, who combined the roles of
pirate, missionary, and adventurer, were planting the seeds
of good trade relations in the Far East, seeds that even-
tually grew into a sprawling empire.
A whole new order of global economic activity was in
 1

ORDER IN THE COURT: THE RENAISSANCE 2

the making, promising lucre and glory. Upper-class gentle-

men, well-to-do merchants, and the shrewd Queen Eliz-
abeth herself were quick to sense the potentially enormous
profits in foreign trade, and before long joint-stock com-
panies were being formed to invest money in trade ven-
tures. By the end of the century England would be trading
with such far-off regions as Africa, Turkey, and India, and
Shakespeare would be able to say that Owen Glendower
in Henry FV Part 1 was "as bountiful As mines of India."
Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor describes his in-
tended courtship of Mistress Page and Mistress Ford in
terms more appropriate to a potential mercantile investor
than a starry-eyed lover: he assesses Mistress Page as "a
region in Guiana, all gold and bounty" and then plots his
investment strategy, "I will be cheaters to them both, and
they shall be exchequers to me. They shall be my East and
West Indies, and I will trade to them both."
Such growing investment opportunities weren't within
the reach of every Elizabethan's pocketbook. But if the
wealth to be gained from the voyages of exploration and
trade was not available to all, at least the information about
world geography and cultures brought back by these world
travelers was for everyone. Maps of the world more accu-
rate than any ever drawn were arriving in England, a fact
that the clever Maria uses to mock Malvolio in Twelfth Night:
"He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new
map with the augmentation of the Indies." And even a ser-
vant like Dromio of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors is
aware of the new dimensions of the world: he gives his
master an impressive global tour when he describes the
globular kitchen wench pursuing him: "she is spherical,
like a globe. I could find out countries in her," he confides,
and proceeds to compare the parts of her body to En-
gland's neighbors France, Spain, Scotland, and the Nether-
lands, as well as the remote and exotic America.
More spellbinding than the geographies were the sen-
sational stories and amazing descriptions of the peoples
and customs of these strange new worlds. Every day an-
other mind-stretching tale of incredible creatures in for-
eign parts docked with the ships in London. Whether it
was a description of the African "sciapod," a being with
only one foot enormous enough to shade him from the
glaring African sun, or a rumor of men with the heads of
 !

22 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

dogs— not unlike that "puppy-headed monster" Cahban

who curses and drinks his way through Shakespeare's TJie
Tempest — the streets of London were buzzing. Savvy Lon-
doners weren't always sure whether or not to believe these
fantastic stories. But if strange creatures such as elephants
from Africa could clump around the animal yard at the
Tower of London, they reasoned, why not man-eating sav-
ages and headless monsters? Ever curious, they didn't think
twice about paying good money to gape at dead crocodiles
brought back from abroad. In fact, these Londoners were
just the kind of people Shakespeare is thinking of when
he has Trinculo encounter Caliban on the island of The
Tempest: "Were I in England now . and had but this fish
. .

painted, not a holiday fool but would give a piece of silver."

In the same breath, Shakespeare makes a stinging com-
ment about Londoners' social priorities: "When they will
not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out
ten to see a dead Indian."
Of course, the Elizabethans had always known about
Europe and had grown up with tales of Turks, Moors, and
other infidels. But suddenly seductive spices, strange
clothes, and glittering jewels were jumping off the safe
pages of travel accounts and into the markets of London,
and accurate descriptions of exotic cultures were flooding
the bookstalls. What was an Elizabethan to make of black
Africans who, according to one explorer's account, wore
heavy gold and ivory jewels over otherwise naked bodies?
Or of the new luxury drink "coffee"? It must have been
vaguely threatening to learn that the English way of doing
things wasn't the only way.

A Mighty Fortress

Nor could the church provide much stability. The reli-

gious changes set in motion decades before Elizabeth came
to the throne were still affecting everyone. Politics and
religion had long been familiar bedfellows in England, and
had become even more intertwined in the early sixteenth
century when Henry VIII decreed that the ruler of the
nation would also be the formal head of the new Protestant
 —
ORDER IN THE COURT: THE RENAISSANCE 23

Church. In EHzabethan times this meant that there was

rarely a religions issno that HiHn't h^^vp politi cal imphca-
tjons
Although Henry's split with the Catholic Church es-
tablished the separate Church of England, it was still on
shaky ground when he died. Following his reign, there
was more than a decade of turmoil and uncertainty, as
each of his successive heirs instituted a different religious
policy. "Bloody" Queen Mary's return to Catholicism pro-
voked widespread hostility and violence in the mid- 1550s.
When Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, she decided
to settle the matter once and for all by freezing the status
quo of her father, warning her subjects not to attempt "the
breach, alteration, or change of any order or usage pres-
ently established within this realm." Elizabeth made the
Protestant faith England's official national religion and
instituted the Book of Common Prayer. She also passed
a law that required every subject to go to church on Sun-
day.
At the same time, she declared that she had no interest
in sifting the consciences of her people. In other words,
as long as everyone looked and acted like Protestants, and
as long as unauthorized forms of worship weren't per-
ceived to threaten national security, she didn't care what
was done in the privacy of her subjects' homes. Although
such tolerance was exceptional at that time, it was a far
cry from the religious freedom in modem democratic na-
tions .Anyon^whopublic^^
the Cfiurch would be taken to the nearest gallows^
As the Church of England became more established in
the course of Elizabeth's reign, two groups of religious
—
and therefore political nonconformists emerged. The first
group were radical reformers who thought that the pro-
cess of change begun by Henry VIII hadn't gone nearly
far enough. These Puritans detested anything that smacked
of Roman Catholic ritual and wanted a church that was
purer, cleaner, and more austere than the Church of En-
gland's version. Their political-religious platform called
for the dismissal of the bishops of the established Church,
whose hierarchical authority was condemned by the more
egalitarian Puritans. Puritan pamphlets urging these and
other reforms circulated all around London.
The queen watched the zealots carefully, wary of those
 !

24 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

who might make trouble and disturb the peace she was
working so hard to bring to the realm. Although she kept
her private views to herself, she was quick to pounce on
anyone she perceived as a real threat. A Puritan separatist
named Henrv' Barrow, for example, was hauled into court
and put on trial for publishing subversive literature crit-
icizing the Church of England and the queen's position
as its head. He confessed, under questioning, that he con-
sidered the Church's Book of Common Prayer "false, su-
perstitious, and popish"; although he acknowledged the
queen as the supreme governor of the Church, he also
asserted that she should make laws based only on the
words of Jesus Christ himself, as quoted in the New Tes-
tament. The court made short shrift of Henr\' Barrow's
argument, and he was publicly hanged soon after his trial.

Ifthe Puritans thought that religious reform hadn't

gone enough, the English Roman Catholics thought
far
that it had already gone much too far. Despite the laws
requiring attendance at Protestant churches, some Cath-
olic recusants —
especially noblemen with large estates in
the remote north —
were faithful to the outlawed forms of
worship. Elizabeth was generally content to leave them
alone as long as she was sure they weren't being disruptive.
And many English Catholics were just as happy to live
and let live, attending Church of England services as re-
quired while still maintaining their allegiance to the Pope
in Rome.
But gradually this precarious balancing act became
impossible, and Catholic allegiances were dangerously split.
When the Pope excommunicated the Protestant Queen
Elizabeth from the Catholic Church— an act of great
hostility —
more than a decade after she had come to the
throne, English Catholics were hopelessly torn between
loyalty to their faith and loyalty to their nation. The Pope's
action, intended to stir up Catholic revolt within England,
had several consequences (although not a Catholic revolt).
First, loyal subjects rushed to their queen's defense with
a stream of anti-Catholic pamphlets, sermons, and bal-
lade. Second, oppression of Catholics within England was
stepped up.
One of Elizabeth's biggest fears was that the Spaniards,
England's chief enemy, would try to infiltrate the com-
 ORDER IN THE COURT: THE RENAISSANCE 25

munity of English Catholics, stir them to rebellion, and

restore Catholicism to England. The approach of the
Spanish Armada in 1588 didn't do much to calm her or
anyone else's fears, even after the would-be invaders suf-
fered a resounding defeat. The queen became more and
more willing to do whatever she felt she had to in order
to protect her countr\''s security, including outright per-
secution.
And so government officers would search the houses
of known Catholic families, however harmless and law-
abiding they might seem, tearing their homes apart until
they found what they had been looking for: Catholic books,
ornaments, and religious images often hidden in holes
beneath the floor. There were several proclamations or-
dering parents of young men studying in Catholic Euro-
pean countries to bring them home to England within four
months. Other decrees put Catholics under a virtual quar-
antine, declaring that no Catholic over the dangerous age
of sixteen could go further than three miles from his home
without special permission, "because the enemy [Spain]
doth make accompt to have the assistance of evil affected
subjects of this land."
While lay Catholics were generally let off with nothing
—
more than a fine. Catholic priests especially those who
had come over from the Jesuit seminaries of Europe to
—
drum up support for their cause were arrested and often
tortured hideously. The most dreaded fate was to be sent
to the house of Richard Topcliffe, who had been given
permission by Queen Elizabeth herself "to torment priests
in his own house in such sort as he shall think good." The
sort he thought good involved clamping a victim's wrists
into iron bands above his head so that his toes just barely
scraped the floor, leaving the weight of his body on his
wrists. Topcliffe may also have thought it good to prolong
torture well after the priest had broken down and con-
fessed. Whether they had to suffer at the hands of Topcliffe
or not, more than one priest was executed for high
treason — not heresy; the English government nearly al-
ways claimed that Catholics were being executed as po-
litical traitors, not heretics or religious martyrs. For in a
nation where being Protestant was equivalent to being
patriotic. Catholics were by definition betraying the na-
tion.
26 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

The position of most English CathoHcs was uncom-

fortable if not dangerous; they were regarded with sus-

picion by the Elizabethan on the street, who imagined

them to be in league with the Spaniards, ready at any
moment to undermine and overthrow Protestant England.
And, as often happens with matters of conscience, the lives
of many families were disrupted. When the husband of
one upper-class woman discovered, after twenty years of
marriage, that she had been a practicing Catholic all along,
he walked out, refused to give her a living allowance, and
denied her custody of their children.
In most cases, though, the result of religious differ-
ences was friction rather than fracture. One young man
grumbled about his old-fashioned parents who were cling-
ing to their Catholic ways: "My father is an old doting fool
and will fast upon the Friday, and my mother goeth always
mumbling on her [rosar>'] beads."

The generation gap wasn't just a religious one; it spread

to all areas of a changing society. The invention of the
printing press, for example, meant that word-of-mouth
traditions passed down by older people
—"time's doting
chronicles," as Shakespeare calls them — were no longer
the only means of finding out about the past. Those who
resolutely held on to the old ways of learning, worship-
ping, and understanding their world were going to be left
behind as the wave of progress carried everyone else for-
ward.
The unsettling speed of change was creating panic within
the aristocracy. Books — —
and knowledge were no longer
limited exclusively to the ruling class. The growing and
profitable trade activities meant that merchants and fin-
anciers were for the first time becoming as wealthy as
hereditary nobles and the landed gentry; in the new eco-
nomic climate, thf^ Hiyisip"*^ Kp|\A'ppn thf social classes
^X];^re_(]\mo\y\r\z* In addition, many Elizabethans thought
that the abandonment of the medieval church and the
celebration of the secular in art and literature were turning
society into an ungodly and immoral place. Nothing seemed
stable or reliable anymore; the old ways were disappearing
fast, and the search for a fixed point of moral reference
—
was a futile one everything depended on your point of
view, for as Hamlet says, "there is nothing either good or
 ORDER IN THE COURT: THE RENAISSANCE 27

bad but thinking makes it so." Anxiety gripped individuals,

families, and the entire society.

A Most Excellent and

Perfect Order?

What did they do about it? Many people ciung tena-

ciously to past ways of understanding the world and mak-
ing sense of their place in it. The more things seemed to
be teetering on the brink of chaos, the more Elizabethan
society emphasized old concepts of order. The more free-
dom and self-determination people gained from trade and
education, the more Elizabethan society stressed rank,
propriety, and obedience. And the fainter the distinctions
of social status and class became, the more Elizabethan
society insisted upon the validity of those distinctions.
The buzz-word of the age was "hierarchy." Hierarchy
was the great bulwark of social inequality that Elizabethan
society put up against the wolves of confusion and dis-
order that were howling at its walls. Each person, ac-
cording to this scheme, had a fixed place along the rigid
colu mns of t he social orde r: and each place came with its
own"\)bligaTiQns) to superiors and inferiors alike. "Every
degree of people . . hath appointed to them, their duty
.

and order," Elizabethans heard in church on Sunday. "Some

are in high degree, some in low, some kings and princes,
some inferiors and subjects. ." The preachers insisted
. .

that such an ordered society was part of God's arrange-

—
ment for the universe "Almighty God hath created and
appointed all things ... in a most excellent and perfect
order."
Nowhere was this principle clearer than in the rigid
clothing laws, which detailed who could wear what. The
idea that the poor and merchant classes might be able to
dress as extravagantly as their social superiors sent shivers
up and down the richly-clothed spines of the upper classes.
Clothing Acts were designed expressly to put a stop to this
"intolerable abuse and unmeasurable disorder," as the Act
of Apparel labeled it. And so no one who ranked lower
28 SHAKESPEARE alive!

than a knight could legally parade around in velvet cloaks

or silk stockings; only countesses and higher could drape
their limbs in the elegance of purple silk; gold and silver
cloth were for the use of hereditary nobles only.
If this plan had worked as it was supposed to, people
would have worn their social standing on their backs. But
for the most part everyone ignored the restrictions, much
to the chagrin of the lawmakers. Puritan writers were
equally annoyed, firing off pamphlets condemning diso-
bedient citizens for wearing rich clothing, "notwithstand-
ing that they be both base by birth, mean by estate, and
servile by calling. This is a great confusion and a general
disorder, God be merciful unto us."

Hierarchy was the guiding principle of all realms of

existence. In the heavenly kingdom, for example, several
levels of archangels and angels spread downward from
God's throne, and each level knew its place. Wasn't Satan
thrown out for offending the principle of heavenly order
and trying to make himself equal with God? The universe
was a hierarchy too, and each planet and star was assigned
to a specific position. As Ulysses says in Shakespeare's
Troilus and Cressida, "the heavens themselves, the planets,
and this center Observ^e degree, priority, and place," The
animal world was another ver\' stratified society in which
each species had its king: the eagle was the king of birds;
the whale the king of fish; and the lion, of course, the king
of beasts.
The Great Chain of Being, stretching from the lowliest
creature in the natural world all the way up to God, con-
nected these worlds to each other, and the hierarchy of
one was mirrored in the others. And so humans could
often justif\' or explain their way of doing things by point-
ing to the animal world. The ruler of England, for example,
was analogous to the king of beasts, and was expected to
display the lion's formidable power. The Queen in Richard
II chides her deposed husband for his unlionlike behavior
when she sees him conveyed to the Tower of London. "The
lion dying thrusteth forth his paw And wounds the earth,
if nothing else, with rage To be o'erpowered; and wilt thou,
pupil-like, Take the correction, mildly kiss the rod, And
fawn on rage with base humility. Which are a lion and
the king of beasts?" Bees were one of the most popular
 ORDER IN THE COURT: THE RENAISSANCE 29

models of good government; in Henry' V, the Archbishop

of Canterbur\ begins a long speech on this topic: ". . for
.

so work the honeybees, Creatures that by a rule in nature

teach The act of order to a peopled kingdom."
Of course, humans were expected to surpass the ex-
amples of the animal world, since they were seen as su-
perior to animals by the measure of their intellect. Luciana
points this out to her married sister Adriana as she lectures
her on the virtues of being submissive to men in The Coju-
edy of Errors: "The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowl,
Are their males' subjects and at their controls. Man, more
divine, the master of all these. Lord of the wade world and
wild watery seas, Endued with intellectual sense and souls,
Of more preeminence than fish and fowls. Are masters to
their females, and their lords; Then let your will attend
on their accords."
A feminist before her time, Adriana replies that "This
servitude makes you to keep unw^ed," but in fact Luciana
is right; Elizabethan attitudes toward the family rein-
forced the wider notions of proper order. The family was
a miniature monarchy, as hierarchical as earthly and
heavenly monarchies. A man's home was literally his cas-
tle, for he was king of the family, with complete authority
over his wife and children. He expected them to be obe-
dient, and they usually were. Whatever children didn't
learn within their families would be learned soon enough
at school, for the educational system was another tool
used to enforce Elizabethan notions of order and obedi-
ence. One of its explicit aims was to educate pupils to be
good, dutiful subjects in the commonwealth.
To transgress boundaries or shirk duties and obliga-
tions was an unforgivable offense against the social order.
It's a theme that Shakespeare addresses again and again.
In Romeo and Juliet, a young woman rejects her obligation
to obey her family's wishes, instead manning the son of
their bitterest enemy. Duke Frederick violates a younger
brother's duty by stealing the power from his older brother,
Duke Senior, while Oliver neglects an older brother's re-
sponsibility to his younger brother, Orlando, in As You
Like It. And Macbeth is one of the biggest transgressors
of all; his murder of King Duncan violates two codes of
honor at once, as he himself recognizes: "He's here in
double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject.
 !

30 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, Who should
against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife
myself."
As Macbeth discovers, the consequences of disregard-
ing order are terrible. His violations plunge Scotland into
bloody civil war. Titus Andronicus fails to show the quality
of mercy to his pleading captive Tamora and brings per-
sonal catastrophe crashing down upon him and his family.
And Bolingbroke's usurpation of the rightful king, Richard
II, infects the kingdom with a disease that will fester for

years in the form of civil rebellion: as the fallen Richard

warns the king-maker Northumberland, "The time shall
not be many hours of age More than it is ere foul sin,
gathering head, Shall break into corruption."
Since all living things were linked by the Great Chain
of Being, violations of order in society were thought to set
off violent disturbances in the heavens or the world of
nature. "Take but degree away," Ulysses warns in Troilus
and Cressida, "untune that string, And hark what discord
follows." Anything out of the ordinary —
floods, storms, un-
—
natural behavior in animals chilled Elizabethan hearts
with fear, for it signaled that the time was out of joint and
disaster imminent. In King Lear, Gloucester darkly pre-
dicts, "These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us." In Julius Caesar, strange and terrible goings-
on are reported in Rome as the conspirators hatch the
assassination plot against the emperor: "A lioness hath
whelped in the streets, And graves have yawned and yielded
up their dead . .Horses did neigh, and dying men did
.

groan, And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets."
Similar signs and omens in Richard II "forerun the death
or fall of kings." And Macbeth's treacherous murder of
Duncan triggers a horrifying chain reaction in nature, as
Lennox reports "Lamentings heard i' th' air, strange screams
of death, And prophesying with accents terrible Of dire
combustion and confused events New hatched to the woe-
ful time."
If these were the probable outcomes of disobedience,
small wonder that order was so highly prized and so re-
peatedly urged on all good citizens. Elizabethans were
reminded over and over that any violation of duty, any
rebelliousness, any tendency to disrespect the laws and
 1

ORDER IN THE COURT: THE RENAISSANCE 3

government of the land would have horrific consequences

not only for the individual but for the state.

The irony of it all was that this elaborate view of a

divinely ordered universe, the "party line" put forth by the
upper classes, neither obscured nor prevented the trans-
formations that were going on in society. Things were
actually quite fluid, at least when compared with previous
centuries. All the pamphlets and sermons and procla-
mations insisting on rigid obedience to a fixed system
were, in the end, simply last-ditch efforts to fend off the
tidal wave of change that threatened to overwhelm the
social order.
And so, paradoxically, the age of great change was also
the age of great conservatism. Ethically, spiritually, and
personally unready to accommodate all the new discov-
eries and advances, many Elizabethans retreated to the
traditional ideal of an unchanging "establishment." For
the alternative — —
chaos and disorder was too horrible to
contemplate. "Take away order from all things," wrote a
contemporary of Shakespeare's plaintively, "what should
then remain?"
 CHAPTER 3

Elizabethan Star
Wars:
Superstition and
THE Supernatural

Do YOU KNOW exactly why thirteen is an unlucky number?

Or why it's a bad omen for a black cat to cross your path?
Or why knocking on wood is supposed to protect you? If
you stop to think about it, you might conclude that you
don't have any explanation for these superstitions.
And yet they exert a mysteriously powerful influence on
the way we behave. You'd have to look long and hard to
find a skyscraper that has a floor numbered thirteen. Many
people go to great lengths to avoid walking under ladders.
And not long ago, a National League baseball team won
a crucial victory after a black cat just "happened" to appear
(some fans suspect it was planted) in fi'ont of the visiting
team's dugout in the middle of the game; from that mo-
ment on, the players couldn't stop committing errors.
The Elizabethans were no different; in fact, in an age
before computers had been invented, before medical sci-
ence understood disease, before astronomy, meteorology,
and geology had learned much about the heavens and
the earth, magical beliefs played an even larger role in
daily life than they do today. Most Elizabethan households
were well stocked with peculiar superstitions and strange
practices: there might be a horseshoe over the door to
ward off evil spirits, an astrological almanac on the table,
a bowl of cream set out for the fairies ever\' night, and a
stockpile of charms to ward off ghosts and witches should
they come a-knocking.
 ELIZABETHAN STAR WARS: SUPERSTITION AND THE SUPERNATURAL 33

Whether it was a magical cure for hiccups or a warning

not to whistle after dark, few people questioned any of these
beliefs or practices. The fact that their parents and grand-
parents had believed in them was good enough. "The su-
perstitious idle-headed eld," Shakespeare says in Tlie Merry
Wives of Windsor, describing one tradition, "Received and
did deliver to our age This tale of Heme the hunter for a
truth." No one really needed to know much more than that.
Except, of course, the Church, which did its best to dis-
courage black (or male\olent) witchcraft. Village priests and
city bishops all o\er England preached that belief in witches,
fairies, ghosts, and the influence of the stars was wicked and
sinful, the work of the Devil. "Let us also learn and confess
with the Prophet David," they might thunder, "that we our-
sehes are the causes of our afflictions; and not exclaim upon
witches, when we should call upon God for mercy."
But they were preaching to deaf ears, and their efforts
didn't meet with much success, especially among the peo-
ple in the countiyside. Despite the law requiring attend-
ance at Protestant senices on Sundays, some people didn't
put too much stock in churchgoing. One defiant old woman
declared that she could serve God as well in the fields as
in the church. The behavior of the vast majority who did
go usually left a lot to be desired. Children ran up and
down the aisles while disruptive senants and apprentices
climbed onto the church roof. More mature members of
the congregation contented themselves with spitting, tell-
ing jokes, falling asleep, shouting back at the preacher,
and sometimes even firing off guns (accidentally). One
man was hauled up to the fi'ont of his church and pub-
licly scolded for "his most loathsome farting." The senice
must have been quite a show, for one worried bishop
sermonized at length on the common people's "heathen-
ish contempt of religion and disdainful loathing of the
ministers."
Indeed, priests hadn't always enjoyed good standing
among the ordinan,- people, especially in the days before
the Protestant Reformation. One man, for example, re-
fused to confess to a priest about his sins with a certain
woman because he was sure that "the priest would be as
ready within two or three days to use her as he [had]."
And the dismantling of the Catholic rituals begun by Prot-
estant reformers set off an orgy of pillage and plunder,
 !

34 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

fueled by resentment of the clergy. Sacred objects were

destroyed, priests' robes vandalized and priests them-
selves beaten up.
And yet, even after the period of Protestant reforms,
many of the old habits and practices associated with the
—
Catholic Church lingered on and some seemed to lead
a double life in the worlds of religion and magic. In pre-
Reformation days, young women had prayed at saints'
shrines for the blessing of blonde hair (Saint Urbane) or
a boy baby (Saint Felicitas). People believed in those days
that if they left church with the wafer of the Mass still in
their mouths, they would have magical powers; others
wore pages from the Scriptures as protective amulets
against the Devil. One farmer even tried to cure his sick
cow by reading it chapters from the Bible!

Were these things worship or wickedness? It wasn't

always clear. If a farmer made the sign of the Cross to
ward off evil spirits, was he engaging in religion or blas-
phemy? If a local folk healer advised a troubled customer
to repeat the Lord's Prayer seven times each morning when
he woke up, was she advising magic or religion? And if a
whole congregation believed in the efficacy of touching
priests' robes or ringing specially-consecrated bells dur-
ing thunderstorms, were they being religious or supersti-
tious? Shakespeare's Dr. Pinch, in The Comedy of Errors,
demonstrates how easily the lines could be blurred as he
tries to cure the supposedly possessed Antipholus of Ephe-
sus with this charm: "I charge thee, Satan, housed within
this man, To yield possession to my holy prayers," and
with this triumphant conclusion, "I conjure thee by all the
saints in heaven."
The Catholic Church seemed to leave the criteria for
distinguishing between magic and religion unclear, de-
ciding arbitrarily that one practice was worshipful and
another sinful. But the Protestant reformers, as might be
expected, had very definite views on the subject. They
insisted that there were no magical powers in any of the
old rituals and practices. Saints' shrines, church bells, rep-
etition of prayers, holy relics, special amulets — all were
swept away in the flood of reform, as "Catholic" graduallj
came to be equated with "superstitious" and "ritual" with
"necromancy." One zealous Protestant even called the sac
 ELIZABETHAN STAR WARS: SUPERSTITION AND THE SUPERNATURAL 35

ramenls "plain devilry, witchcraft and all that naught

. . .

is." Instead of spells, incantations, charms, and conjuring,

Protestant preachers recommended prayer, penitence,
fasting, and faith in God's inscrutable will.
Since this was not an easy exchange, it was one not often
made by most people. Complicated and erudite theologi-
cal debates didn't really interest them; their approach to
religion was fairly elementary. The world was divided into
good and evil; the good was to be embraced, the evil to be
—
eschewed by whatever means were at hand, including
superstition and magic. And so they went right on making
the sign of the Cross, using holy relics, and relying on a
host of nonreligious superstitions to help them avoid or
survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
There were many beliefs that guided day-to-day activ-
ities and gave great significance to the most ordinary oc-
currences. When an Elizabethan fell from his horse, for
example, he would carefully note the day and hour of the
fall as an unlucky time to ride. If a child or animal came
between two friends as they strolled in the meadows, it
was a sure sign that they would soon be goin^ their sep-
arate ways. Putting a shirt on wrong side out in the morn-
ing usually foretold a bad day. Birds had their uses, too:
chattering magpies announced the arrival of guests, while
a croaking raven issued the more ominous warning that
the dreaded bubonic plague was on its way.
Certain numbers, of course, were luckier than others;
as Falstaff remarks in The Merry' Wives of Windsor, "They
say there is divinity in odd numbers." And particular days
of the month were advisable for starting a journey, sowing
crops, or even cutting fingernails! If paved sidewalks had
been invented, Elizabethans would undoubtedly have taken
great care to avoid stepping on the cracks.

Star-struck

The Elizabethans were great believers in the influence of

the stars and the planets. How could they have been oth-
erwise when the rhythms and routines of their daily lives
were so dependent on the skies? The stars were not dimmed.
36 SHAKESPEARE ALI\ e!

as one day they would be, by the lurid yellow glow of big-
city lights. And without street lights, desk lamps, and elec-
tric was undertaken only by the shine of the
wiring, travel
fullmoon, study illuminated by the flickering light of the
candle, and plays put on in the daylight hours of the af-
ternoon. The working day was longer in the summer, when
light lingered until ten or eleven o'clock at night.
The influence of the heavens on the environment was
equally inescapable; crops rose or rotted according to the
disposition of the sun, the moon, and the rain. The weather,
particularly the phases of the moon, also affected the bal-
ance of hot and cold, dr\' and moist in the human body
— the humors. And so it followed, as the night the day,
that the heavens influenced personal fortunes as well.
Given the arrangement of the universe, as it was then
understood, astrology made a good deal of sense. Despite
the recently-advanced theories of Copernicus, which took
a long time to catch on, most people probably still believed
that the Earth, not the Sun, was the center of the universe.
The "heavens themselves, the planets, and this center," as
Ulysses calls them in Troilus and Cressida, were seen as a
series of spheres within spheres —
not unlike the little
wooden Russian dolls that keep opening up to reveal a
still smaller doll inside. The outermost sphere was called
by its Latin name, the primum mobile. Within it was the
"starry firmament," as one poetic-minded astrologer called
it— the sphere of stars, permanently in place. Next came
the seven planets —
cold, dry Saturn, fair and bright Ju-
piter, fiery Mars, the Sun ("the well of pure light," said the
same astrologer), moist, chilly Venus, dimmer Mercury,
and the Moon. And finally, in dead center, hung the small,
motionless Earth, suspended from God's throne by a golden
—
chain the primary object of His attention.
An elaborate system of belief unfolded quite naturally
from this picture of the universe. As the planets orbited
and the spheres revolved against the permanent backdrop
of the twelve signs of the zodiac, their influence was felt
on human life below. For example, the configuration of
the skies and stars at the exact moment of a person's
birth —which any half-competent astrologer could ascertain
— determined what kind of person he or she would be and
what kind of life, and death, would follow.
 —
ELIZABETHAN STAR WARS: SUPERSTITION AND THE SL PERNATLRAL 37

Romeo and Juliet may be the most famous pair of

"star-crossed lovers," but other Shakespearean characters
also reflect the influence of the stars. In Henrys VI Part 2,
as the Duke of Suffolk is about to be murdered on ship-
board, he recalls, "A cunning man did calculate my birth
And told me that by water I should die." And sometimes
astrolog>- has less tragic consequences: when Benedick
is having trouble composing a love poem to Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing, he consoles himself with the
knowledge that "I was not born under a rhyming planet,
nor I cannot woo in festi\'al terms." Julia, in The Two
Gentlemen of Verona, puts all her faith in astrolog\', con-
fident that her particular gentleman of Verona will be
as faithful as she, since "truer stars did govern Proteus'
birth."
Consulting the stars — courtesy of the local stargazer
in a village or a fancier private practitioner in London
helped confused Elizabethans determine what specific
course of action to take. An astrologer who knew the po-
sition of the starsand planets at the e.xact moment a cru-
cialquestion was asked could then provide answers to all
sorts of personal queries —
when to get married, when to
look for a job, and even that rare dilemma of when to take
a bath (never, was the usual answer!). Failing to act at
the moment dictated by the heavens was invariably cat-
astrophic. As Prospero acknowledges in The Tempest, "my
zenith doth depend upon A most auspicious star, whose
influence If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes Will
ever after droop."
Many of Queen Elizabeth's courtiers shared Duke Pros-
pero's affinity for stargazing; it had a huge following at
Court. High-ranking government officials and famous men
were avid enthusiasts, among them Sir Walter Raleigh and
the queen's fa\'orite, the Earl of Esse.x. Lord Burleigh, Eliz-
abeth's right-hand minister, e\'en invested some money in
a corporation run by an astrologer/alchemist who prom-
ised to turn iron into copper, at huge profits to the inves-
tors. And the Earl of Leicester conferred at length with
the well-known astrologer John Dee to ascertain the most
— —
auspicious day and hour for Queen Elizabeth's coro-
nation.
Elizabeth herself, however, did not share her courtiers'
 !

38 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

enthusiasm; her own skepticism of astroiog\' was well

known and, like everything else about her, celebrated. She
astonished and impressed a group of her courtiers when
a comet came hurtling near the Earth; unswayed by their
pleas that it was highly dangerous to look at comets, she
walked right up to the window and said daringly, "The die
is cast." The fact that she continued to rule successfully
for more than twenty years after this incident should have
told her superstitious nobles something about astrology,
but apparently it did not.

Astrology wasn't just the preserve of the glittering stars

of the Court. If anything, it was even more popular in the
workaday world. Landless laborers and gentlemen farm-
ers alike could keep up with the latest astrological fore-
casts for just a few pennies by buying an almanac from a
wandering bookseller. These almanacs were as widely
circulated in Elizabethan times as gossipy grocery-stand
newspapers are today. Although they didn't have daily
horoscopes counseling a romantic rendezvous with a dark
lady or predicting a profitable business deal, they were
absolutely chock-full of interesting and relevant infor-
mation.
For example, they had a helpful list of upcoming as-
tronomical events, such as eclipses and full moons events —
that could greatly influence schedules. No wonder Bottom
calls foran almanac in A Midsummer Night's Dream: "A
calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac. Find out moon-
shine ..." as he and his company of amateur actors try
to decide what night they'll perform their play. The al-
manacs also had calendars listing the months, the days of
the week, and fixed church holidays such as Christmas.
The "prognostication" outlined unusual astrological oc-
currences likely to happen in the next year. And sprinkled
throughout were gardening tips, notices of markets and
fairs, and weather reports; Enobarbus in Antony and Cleo-
patra says sarcastically that Cleopatra's sighs and tears
"are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can re-
port." There was also helpful medical advice; one almanac
prognosticator, Leonard Digges, warned his readers to un-
dergo the operation of bloodletting only on "a fair, tem-
perate day."
 ELIZABETHAN STAR WARS: SUPERSTITION AND THE SUPERNATURAL 39

Ghost-busted

Many an Elizabethan bedside was haunted by fears of

what one writer called "the terrors of the night." Chief
—
among these night visitors were ghosts souls of the dead
who were making return trips to earth for ver\- specific
and rarely comforting reasons. They invariably limited
their visiting hours to the hospitable darkness of the night,
disappearing as dawn broke; as Puck points out to Oberon
in A Midsummer Night's Dream, "yonder shines Aurora's
harbinger, At whose approach, ghosts, wand'ring here and
there, Troop home to churchyards."
Ghosts were terribly gruesome, nothing like the harm-
less white-sheeted Halloween figures that the word con-
jures up in the twentieth centuiy. In fact, as revitalized
corpses, they usually came back to earth looking as they
did when they left it: the ghost of Hamlet's father wears
"the ver\' armor he had on When he the ambitious Nor\vay
combated." His beard, Horatio tells Hamlet, "was, as I
have seen it in his life, A sable silvered," and his face is
still pale from the poison that killed him. Banquo's ghost,

stabbed to death by Macbeth's henchmen, appears at

the banquet with bloodied countenance and still-oozing
—
wounds, to Macbeth's horror "Never shake Thy gory locks
at me," he cries out. The ghost of Banquo, like many other
ghosts, is only visible to the person he is haunting which —
makes his visitation more terrif\ing still.

Aghost always had a mission when he came to earth

— although it might var\' considerably. Some came to ask

for a proper burial, without which they were condemned

to wander for an eternity; Puck speaks of "Damned [con-
demned] spirits all. That in crossways and floods have bur-
ial." Others saw into the future and wanted to warn the
living, and still others intended to punish a promise-breaker.
The ghosts who hover over the bed of Shakespeare's mur-
derous Richard III have returned to avenge their deaths
at his hands and to predict his imminent defeat in battle:
"Despair and die" is their refrain, and, indeed, it is an-
swered the very next day. Hamlet's father comes to expose
Claudius' foul play, revealing to Hamlet that "The serpent
40 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

that did sting thy father's life Now wears his crown." When
Hamlet fails to act in revenge, the ghost appears again,
lecturing his son that "this visitation Is but to whet thy
almost blunted purpose."
Not only was a ghostly visitation unpleasant, but it also

cast the visited into a state of spiritual confusion: the Church

insisted that ghosts were really just devils in disguise. If
a ghost told a young man to kill his uncle, how could he
be sure that it wasn't Satan tempting him to sin? This is
an essential part of Hamlet's dilemma: is the ghost of his
father really who he says he is? "Angels and ministers of
grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned.
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell. Be
thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com'st in such a
questionable shape That I will speak to thee." Horatio
fears that the ghost is a devil who will lure Hamlet to his
death: "What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, Or
to the dreadful summit of the cliff .And there assume
. .

some other horrible form Which might deprive your

sovereignty of reason And draw you into madness?" No
doubt many Elizabethans felt caught in the middle: obey-
ing a devil would cast them into hell, but ignoring a real
ghost had equally dire consequences. Perhaps the safest
tactic was to live an upright life —and hide beneath the
bedcovers.

Fairy-tailed

If worries about ghosts weren't enough to guarantee

sleepless nights, there were the fairies to think about,
too. Those to be feared weren't the tiny sweet playful fair-
ies that Shakespeare invented for A Midsummer Night's
—
Dream that mischief-making but good-hearted fairy tribe
led by Oberon and Titania; nor were they the cute little
animated figures who flit around Walt Disney Studios on
their shimmering wings. No, these Elizabethan fairies were
life-sized creatures, fiendish and malicious, who made the
milk go sour and the livestock sick. This is the kind of
fairy that Dromio of Syracuse means when he calls his
 1

ELIZABETHAN STAR WARS: SUPERSTITION AND THE SUPERNATURAL 4

churlish master in TJie Comedy of Errors "k fiend, a fairy,

pitiless and rough."
Fairies came in several models: there were hostile river
spirits and wily mermaids who lured unsuspecting sailors
to their deaths; giants and hags; fairy aristocrats who, like
their human counterparts, spent their time dancing, hunt-
ing, and feasting; and the ordinary everyday goblins. But
not all fairies were malevolent. Best-known of all was the
native English fairy Robin Good-fellow, or Puck, a "shrewd
and knavish sprite," as Shakespeare calls him, who was
the special guardian of home and hearth.
The fairies considered the workings of the household
to be their special concern and inspected domestic op-
erations during their nocturnal visits. They rewarded a
well-kept house and a well-swept hearth by helping with
the chores and bringing luck. Puck could make himself
particularly useful to a family that treated him well; as a
fellow-fairy points out in A Midsummer Night's Dream,
"Those that 'Hobgoblin' call you, and 'Sweet Puck,' You
do their work, and they shall have good luck."
The best strategy for an Elizabethan family to adopt
with the fairies was one of preemptive obedience and flat-
tery, which might work where charms and conjurations
failed. They could also be won over by food and drink left
out for them at night. As a contemporary wrote, women
"were wont to set a bowl of milk before [the fairies] and
Robin Good-fellow, for grinding of malt or mustard, and
sweeping the house at midnight."
But woe to the housewife who neglected her chores!
The fairies were enemies of untidiness, or "sluttery," and
punished it wherever they found it, almost always by third-
degree pinching during the night: "Where fires thou find'st
unraked, and hearths unswept. There pinch the maids as
blue as bilberry. Our radiant Queen hates sluts and slut-
tery," the make-believe fairies are reminded in The Merry
Wives of Windsor.
Pinching wasn't reserved only for the slovenly house-
keeper, however; the lustful and lecherous —
or any other
—
mortals judged offensive by the fairies often found them-
selves similarly bruised when they woke up. This is why
Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, the merry wives of Wind-
sor, can punish the lustful (and superstitious) Falstaff by
 —
42 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

dressing children up "fairylike, to pinch the unclean knight."

And Dromio of Syracuse, bewildered by the topsy-turvy
events of The Comedy of Errors, wonders if he and his
master have blundered into the wrong place: "This is the
fairy land. O spite of spites, We talk with goblins, elves,
and sprites! If we obey them not, this will ensue: They'll
suck our breath or pinch us black and blue."
One thing fairies enjoyed more than anything was
causing domestic confusion with their practical jokes
which sometimes weren't so funny. They loved dair\' tricks
— spilling the milk from the pail as the milkmaid carried
it back to the house, or keeping the cream from turning

to butter. Fairies put spells on animals, sometimes even

causing death. And they considered it great fun to lead
travelers astray: Caliban, in The Tempest, mutters that his
master Prospero will send fairies who will "lead me, like
a firebrand, in the dark Out of my way."
Fairies were most notorious and most feared for their
practice of abducting a human baby from its cradle and
replacing it with a fairy' changeling, which was usually
hideous, deformed, or retarded. This was one of an Eliz-
abethan mother's greatest fears. But King Henrv IV, fed
up with his Plantagenet son's wild and riotous behavior
(in contrast to the honor and valor of the young Percy)
resorts to some wishful thinking about changelings: "O,
that it could be proved That some night-tripping fairy had
exchanged In cradle clothes our children where they lay,
And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet!"
Of course, no Elizabethan actually saw the fairies ab-
ducting a human baby; for that matter no Elizabethan
ever saw a fairy at all. In the first place, they came out
—
only during the night Puck calls himself "that merry
wanderer of the night." In the second place, evei-yone knew
that mortals were expressly forbidden to see or speak to
fairies. They guarded their privacy fiercely and didn't take
at all kindly to being spied on, even accidentally. This is
the fear that grips Falstaff as the child-fairies dance around
him. Throwing his huge body down on the ground outside
Windsor Forest, he yelps, "They are fairies. He that speaks
to them shall die. I'll wink and couch; no man their works
must eye."
The fact that the Elizabethans never saw the fairies
didn't suggest to anyone that they weren't real. After all,
 ELIZABETHAN STAR WARS: SUPERSTITION AND THE SUPERNATURAL 43

proof of their existence could be established in the over-

turned milk pails, the diseased animals, the lost travelers,
the housewives pinched black and blue. What more evi-
dence did anvone need?

Spell-bound

Even more sinister than fairies, in the minds of Eliza-

bethans, were the old hags thought to be evil witches. The
accused men and women were often ugly, poverty-stricken,
and diseased, or as a contemporary put it,
disheveled,
"commonly old, lame, blear\'-eyed, pale, foul, and full of
wrinkles." A frequent scenario leading to charges of black
witchcraft (as opposed to the helpful white magic of the
local wise woman) was this: someone —
usually a woman
— living on the fringes of village life was offended by a
neighbor or a passerby. She uttered a curse or some sort
of malediction; when someone fell ill or something went
wrong, her harsh words were remembered, and she was
brought to trial as a witch.
Many Elizabethans were afraid that these "Soul-killing
witches that deform the body," as Antipholus of Syracuse
calls them in Tlie Comedy of Errors, would overrun En-
gland unless they were hunted down and punished ac-
—
cording to the law which could require death. Even
members of the queen's government were alarmed; the
Lord Chief Justice declared that "The land is full of witches
. .they abound in all places.
.
." Out of these irrational
. .

fears came the massive witch-hunts of the sixteenth cen-

tury in which hundreds of defenseless old people were
burned to death for crimes they didn't commit.
It wasn't only England's problem; witches were feared
all over Europe as well. The Europeans hated the witches
for different reasons. They objected more on theological
grounds, citing the supposed satanic beliefs of the witches
and their heretical partnership with the Devil. Not too
many of the ordinary people in England cared much about
heretical beliefs —
indeed, given the constant switching back
and forth between the Catholic and the Protestant Church
in the last few decades, what was "heretical" one dav was
 !

44 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

"belief" the next.To most Elizabethans, witchcraft wasn't

a matter of thought but of action; they went on the hunt
only when there was actual damage done, either by witches
or their Satanic sidekicks known as "familiars," evil spirits
that became cats or other animals to carry out the witches'
instructions.
Unlike the fairies' activities, black magic was always
malevolent; the harm witches could do ranged from the
merely annoying to the totally destructive. They kept the
beer from fermenting and the butter from hardening. They
caused men and women to commit adultery; they could
prevent women from getting pregnant and cause miscar-
riages or stillbirths. A contemporary document had them
"boil infants (after they have murdered them unbaptized)"
and "eat the flesh and drink the blood of men and children
openly." Witches also cast spells on animals and humans,
causing sickness and death.
They had fearful powers over the elements; like "the
foul witch Sycorax" of Shakespeare's The Tempest, they
had the power to "control the moon, make flows and ebbs,"
manipulating the winds and rains to bring bad weather.
Macbeth begs the witches, "Though you untie the winds
and let them fight Against the churches Though bladed
. . .

com be lodged and trees blown down answer me To

. . .

what I ask you."

Cursing and uttering evil charms were probably the
most common ways these witches operated. Caliban and
Prospero practically have a cursing contest in The Tem-
pest: the monster cries, "All the charms Of Sycorax, toads,
beetles, bats, light on you!" and Prospero, in turn, issues
equally dire threats: "If thou neglect'st or dost unwillingly
What I command, I'll rack thee with old cramps. Fill all
thy bones with aches, make thee roar That beasts shall
tremble at thy din."
The Elizabethans didn't have to rely on Shakespeare
for evidence of witches' "mischiefs manifold and sorceries
terrible" (as Prospero calls them) when there were plenty
of real-life examples closer to home. There was the case
in one village of a young man who simply insulted a foul-
looking old woman in the alehouse after one beer too
many. "Do you hear, witch," he called to her, "look tother
ways, I cannot abide a nose of that fashion, or else turn
your face the wrong side outward, it may look like raw
 ELIZABETHAN STAR WARS: SUPERSTITION AND THE SUPERNATURAL 45

flesh for flies toblow maggots in." She cursed him, he fell
ill,and she "worthily suffered death."
In another village, Alice Trevisard knocked on her
neighbor's door one afternoon and asked for a half-penny's
worth of beer. The neighbor refused, Alice muttered om-
inously, "I will not leave you worth a groat," and two days
later, one of the neighbor's precious beer barrels suddenly
leaped in the air of its own accord, fell on the ground, and
—
exploded. All the beer was lost ruinous in times of high
grain prices. Alice faced charges of witchcraft as a result.
There was more to witchcraft than ominous mutter-
ings and curses —
charms and magical methods were equally
effective. Some witches concocted truly horrible mixtures
of hair, saliva, blood, urine, and animal entrails —
as stom-
ach-turning as anything Macbeth's witches throw into their
—
bubbling cauldron "Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool
of bat and tongue of dog," "sow's blood, that hath eaten
Her nine farrow; grease that's sweaten From the murder-
er's gibbet."
Image-magic was another technique in the witches'
bag of tricks, though one less frequently used. The witch
would make a likeness of her intended victim out of clay,
wax, wood, or whatever material she could get her hands
on, and then prick the part she wanted to hurt. When the
Earl of Derby suddenly died there was rumor that a wax
image with a hair through its heart had been found in his
room, and an old woman was held for questioning. A
surgeon in another parish was suspected of making a w^ax
picture of his mother-in-law in order to get rid of her!
Most Elizabethans probably preferred a tactic of non-
confrontation with those they thought were witches. But
when they did find themselves the victims of witchcraft,
what could they do?
They could start by trying to identifv' which witch was
the guilty one, with the considerable help of the village
wizard. Burning a handful of thatch from a suspected
witch's cottage, for example, usually brought about a
confession. To find the witch who had bewitched his cat-
tle, a farmer need only follow this charm: "Put a pair of
breeches upon the cow's head, and beat her out of the
pasture with a good cudgel upon a Friday, and she will
run right to the witch's door, and strike thereat with her
horns."
46 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

Once the witch's identity had been pinned down, there

were various kinds of retahatory magic that would reverse
her spell, courtesy of the local wizard. Burying a bot-
tle filled with thorns or pins or needles, adding fingernails
or hair or urine for good measure, often did the trick, A
truly foolproof method, which had the extra advantage of
curing the victim of the spell, was to scratch the witch
until she bled. And, of course, execution by burning was
a fool-proof solution.

House Calls

One comfort in the midst of all this anxiety about the

supernatural was the local wise woman or cunning man,
whose white magic provided remedies for the perplexed,
injured, or beleaguered. Combining the roles of astrologer,
physician, and psychologist, these white witches were
enormously popular with the ordinary people and offered
a range of useful services.
They could help their hapless customers recover stolen
goods or escape arrest, win at cards or win at love. They
could catch a thief using a contemporary version of a
police lineup: writing the names of the suspects on scraps
of paper, rolling them up in little clay balls, throwing them
into a pail of water, and pronouncing the guilty party to
be whichever ball unrolled first. They also advised on per-
sonal affairs. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Slender seeks
out a wise woman to find out "whether one Nym . that
. .

beguiled him of a chain, had the chain or no," while Sim-

ple inquires "if it were my master's fortune to have [Ann
Page] or no."
The wizards also acted as local doctors, at much more
affordable prices than real medical men. They had fistfuls
of home remedies for stings, blisters, bums, running sores,
cramps, and the "thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir
to" (as Hamlet might say). They cured headaches —
not by
advising two aspirin and a call in the morning but by the
more hands-on method of driving a nail into the skull of
a dead man. If that failed, there was always this charm:
"Tie a halter [noose] about your head, wherewith one hath
 ELIZABETHAN STAR WARS: SUPERSTITION AND THE SUPERNATURAL 47

been hanged." Were warts the problem? Relief was at hand,

not in the form of Compound W, but in the more down-
to-earth remedy of sprinkling dirt from a newly-dug grave
over the offending growths. One shudders to think what
their cure for pimples was.
Of course, sometimes these cunning folk ran afoul
of the Church because of their prominence in the lives of
their fellow \illagers. Many Elizabethans would choose
the instant gratification of a visit to a white w itch over the
longer-term Church treatment of prayer and fasting, much
to the annoyance of the \111age clerg\'. Of coui'se, the Church
itself wasn't above using a little white magic; officials in
one parish hired a wise woman to discover who ran off
with their altar cloth!

Magical beliefs provided the Elizabethans with the

comfort of explanations and the satisfaction of redress
when random and inexplicable misfortunes occurted. The
preachers of the day preferred to view such calamities as
instances of God's wrath toward sinful mortals. But to
many Elizabethans, it was much more consoling to believe

that the cause of the disaster was something outside of

them, that the fault lay not in themselves but in their stars,
that a fair\- was to blame for the spilled milk, or that a
devil made them do it.
Witches, of course, were the best scapegoats of all.
They were real people readily available to scream at, scratch,
and even put to death. Because of their odd appearanc e
and behavior, peo ple snsp^ rtpH ot being witches were egs v"
foigcl s. In fdcTTamone perceived as deviating from the
English Tiorm might suffer this kind of "outrageous and
barbarous cruelty." The need for a scapegoat was over-
whelming; if witches weren't there to fulfill it, other
—
groups immigrants and foreigners, for example might —
step in to take their place.
 CHAPTER 4

Don't Talk to
Strangers:
Foreigners and
Immigrants in
England
To MANY EUROPEANS hard-presscd by the events of the six-
teenth century, England must have looked like the land
of plenty— plenty of money, plenty of freedom, plenty of
opportunity. For all was not well on the Continent. The
sometimes brutal efforts of French and Spanish Catholics
to destroy the forces of Protestant resistance were making
life difficult for non-Catholic Dutch and French Huguen-
ots. And England's expanding trade activity dangled the
prospect of great wealth in front of profit-minded Euro-
pean traders and merchants.
For whatever reasons, foreigners were flooding England
— or so it seemed to the provincial English. In fact, the
influx was small by today's standards. But like modern im-
migrants, they were eager to find the freedom they lacked
at home or to fulfill their dreams in this wonderful new
land.
The attraction was not at all mutual, however, and
these foreigners were not exactly welcomed with open
arms after they had made the Channel crossing and landed
at Dover. The English had a well-desen/ed reputation for
hating "strangers," as they called foreigners. More than
one European traveler returned from a tour of England
to echo the words of the Antwerp merchant who remarked
that the English are "very suspicious of foreigners, whom
they despise." Even an Elizabethan would acknowledge
this fault in his people when he wrote a history of the age:
 —
don't talk to strangers 49

many citizens, said John Stow, " (especially the more or-
dinary sort) had no great love for them [strangers] and
were glad of an opportunity of oppressing them."
For England, unlike the American nation it eventually
spawned, took no pride in becoming a melting pot for
many cultures.. Even though Elizabethans were living in
an age when explorers, scholars, merchants, and writers
were flinging open the doors to other cultures, most people
prefen-ed to hang back, tarrying on the well-trodden
thresholds of ignorance and fear.
Except for the very rich or the ver\' enterprising, the
majority of Elizabethans never crossed the Channel to get
to know Europe on its own terms. As one observant Ger-
man summed it up, "because the greater part, especially
the tradespeople, seldom go into other countries, but al-
ways remain in their houses in the city attending to their
business, they care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh
at them." Aside from the thrown-together companies of
traveling English "comedians" and the British troops
each group going for reasons other than tourism not —
many bona-fide Elizabethan travelers ever graced the
countries of Europe with their presence.
As far as their queen was concerned, this was all for
the good. The government was chronically worried about
the considerable dangers of Catholic infiltration. Since
Europe was largely Catholic, Protestant England was
deathly afraid that its impressionable young Protestants
would be first taken in by foreign hosts and then taken
over by Catholicism. Accordingly, the government made
getting there no fun at all; an Elizabethan had to have a
fairly intense desire to travel — and good connections in
the government — to cut his way through the red tape. In
order to leave England, testimonies to the good upstand-
ing Protestantism of the prospective traveler often had to
be given, a defense of the value of the trip might have to
be advanced in the presence of opposing government of-
ficials, and a special license or passport had to be wangled.
Even then the Elizabethan traveler couldn't rest easy; sev-
eral times, when Catholic fears gripped the queen, she
issued proclamations calling back any English subjects
who were studying or traveling in Catholic countries.
Not only did foreign travel expose impressionable young
men to the lurking forces of Catholicism, it also made them
50 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

vulnerable to foreign fopperies and fripperies. According

to this theory, people who went abroad as upstanding
Elizabethans returned as pretentious snobs, mindlessly
aping the trends, fashions, phrases, and manners of foreign
—
lands just the sort of affectation that Rosalind credits
Jaques with in As You Like It: "Farewell, Monsieur Traveler.
Look you lisp and wear strange suits, disable all the
benefits of your own country, be out of love with your
nativity, and almost chide God for making you that coun-
tenance you are; or I will scarce think you have swam
in a gondola." Portia delivers a similarly withering criti-
cism of her English suitor as she dismisses him before
he ever makes it onto the stage of The Merchant of Venice:
"I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in
France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior every-
where."
Instead of going to all the unnecessary trouble and
expense of travel, these practical English suggested, why
not just read about it? Books written by others were far
better— —
and much safer sources of information about
other lands. As one upper-class noblewoman advised her
son: "The language to be learned with the sight of coun-
tries [can be learned] here at home by books with less
danger than, in these days, by journey. The certain fruits
daily found of young men's travel nowadays [are] nothing
but pride, change, and vanity."
But in advocating such books, these armchair travelers
were putting their trust in notoriously unreliable sources
of information, full of what a critic called "sweet-sauc'd
lies." The farther some travelers got from home, the taller
their tales of other lands seemed to get. Rather than giving
sympathetic and objective portraits of other countries and
peoples, most of these travel accounts simply reinforced
— —
damaging and marketable stereotvpes, perpetrating far-
fetched and best-selling myths. And so it wasn't suiprising
that the English lacked a realistic understanding of other
cultures.

Hand in hand with the Elizabethan people's provincial

outlook went the certainty that they were better than
everyone else. Once the English had more or less settled
the religious question, built up a powerful nav\', and es-
tablished themselves as a power to be reckoned with in
 1

don't talk to strangers 5

international politics, they experienced a wave of intense

patriotism. This is the emotion that Shakespeare appeals
to throughout Henry V, especially as the hero-king Henry
leads his men against France with stirring words: "On,
on, you noblest English, Whose blood is fet from fathers
of warproof . And you, good yeomen Whose limbs were
. .

made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture;

let us swear that you are worth your breeding."
If the Elizabethans saw a good-looking but obviously
foreign man on the street they pitied him for not being
—
an Englishman as if that were the pinnacle of exis-
tence. Stereotvpes rose easily to their lips, and they were
quick to pin pithy national characteristics on foreigners.
Thumbing through the work of one popular prose-writer,
an Elizabethan might come across statements such as "pride
is the disease of the Spaniard"; the Italian is "a cunning
proud fellow"; the Frenchman "for the most part loves
none but himself and his pleasures"; and the Danes are
"the most gross and senseless proud dolts."
On top of these traditional stereotypes and the instinc-
tive English dislike of anything foreign was a pile of spe-
cific fears about church and pocketbook. There was a
general prejudice, for example, one shared by all the
Christian nations of Europe, against the so-called infidel
races— Turks, Mo ors, and Jew s. To an Elizabethan it was
not shocking for the witches in Macbeth to toss "Liver of
blaspheming Jew," "Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips" into
their cauldron along with such delicacies as "Finger of
birth-strangled babe" and "baboon's blood." There was a
storehouse of concocted myths about ritual murders of
Christian infants by Jews for religious purpose s, myths
lliai Usually surfaced around tne time ot the Jewish Pass-
over. And Turkish atrocities —
the torturing, imprisoning,
and impressing of rh'ld^f" '"^o tb^ Turkish arm y were —
chronicled in John Foxe's gor>', gossipy, contrived best-
seller, The Book of Martyrs.
Where infidels feared to tread. Catholics rushed in to
pose another big threat to Elizabethans' sense of well-
being. As acknowledged leaders in the free world of Prot-
estantism, the Queen's English were implacably opposed
to Catholicism in any form —
especially its Spanish form.
But even the state of their Church wasn't as troubling
as the state of their w allets, and manv Elizabethans were
52 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

worried about foreign bodies in their economic system.

The inchnation to shun homemade EngHsh products in
favor of foreign imports raised a protest from protection-
ists and patriots in London: "many things thereof are not
there [in London] made, but beyond the sea; whereby the
artificers [craftsman] of our towns are idle." The trade
imbalance was enough of a threat on its own, but when
foreign workers kept popping up in the English labor force
during the heavy unemployment of the late sixteenth cen-
tury, the level of English anxiety about losing jobs to for-
eigners rose dramatically. Though Shylock might believe
that "the trade and profit of the city Consisteth of all na-
tions," the English preferred that profit to consist of one
—
nation only their own.

A would-be European immigrant on the eve of his de-

parture for England might very well have second thoughts.
He might realize that he just wouldn't win with the En-
glish, no matter who he was. If Turkish or Jewish, he'd
be scorned as an infidel; if Dutch or French Protestant,
he'd be resented as an economic rival; if Spanish, he'd
most likely be drawn and quartered. With sinking spirits,
he might wonder whether it was too late to change his
—
mind about going better to face a known enemy at home
than an unknown one in a strange land. But then a cheery
thought might strike him: these expectations were based
on nothing more solid than rumor and hearsay. Perhaps
things would be different once he arrived.

Turning Turk

Although their government had recently established

trade relations with the English nation, Turks didn't take
the idea of going to England very seriously. In fact, the
first Turkish official to visit London didn't arrive until after
Elizabeth's death. But if they rarely appeared in the flesh,
they were certainly there in spirit, a subject of endless
fascination to Elizabethans, whose imaginations were fed
by "true-to-life" accounts of travelers and merchants cap-
 —
don't talk to strangers 53

on the newly-established trade relations between

italizing
England and the Levant.
The relentless pus h of Turkish forces into eastern Eu-
rope and their political Ht^minatit^r^ of the peoples they
conquered were casting a shadow over the rest of Europe;
the Ottoman Empire hung like a dark rain-cloud on the
European sk\'line. The free world speculated endlessly about
the 'Vjnj-inij^s erTtftk=e^f th^ Tjuiks, ili£jres ent terrflicoX.
^theWotld/' as one historian christened mem. The Eliza-
DctKajicurrosity seemed unquenchable —
they thirsted to
know why the Turks were so successful. Was it their native
hardiness? Stem discipline? Stamina on the battlefield?
Was it Islamic unity? Evervone had an opinion. But what-
ever the secret of their success, one thing was for sure
the Turks were much admired from afar.
And yet the Elizabethans' admiration was tinged with
both fear and scorn. They disdained Turks as infid els,
^unbaptized and unblessed bv the Chrisfian churc"Ii!^li^
abethan diplomatic documents and treaties with" other
European nations referred to the Turkish nation as the
"ancient common enemy and adversary- of our faith." The
Turkish infidels were considered the stubborn antagonists
of Christian Europe and were disparaged accordingly.
The infidels were seen as creatures of boundless cru-
elty, holding no act of violence too extreme. Stories of
their atrocities sent shudders up and down Elizabethan
spines— plunder, pillage, and barbaric executions, like that
of the man who was buried waist-deep in the earth and
pierced by hundreds of arrows of sharp-shooting Turkish
archers, the legend of the Turkish sultan Amurath, who
had his nineteen brothers (potential rivals for power)
strangled as he looked on, was another widely-circulated
story. When Prince Harry becomes King Henr\' in Shake-
speare's Henry IV Part 2, he reassures his anxious brothers
that "This is the English, not the Turkish court; Not Amu-
rath an Amurath succeeds. But Harry- Harry."
Several other characteristics that came under the label
"Turk" included stubh nmnpss^ 1nstfi]]ne^«; ^X}r\ gpnprp|l
barbarisfn. "Stubborn Turks," declares the Duke in The
" Merchant
of Venice, are "never trained To offices of tender
courtesy." And in As You Like It, Rosalind's reaction to
Phebe's supposedly antagonistic letter is this: "Why, she
 !

54 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

defies me, Like Turk to Christian." As Edgar plays the part

of a lunatic in King Lear, he boasts of his lust by saying
that he has "in woman out-paramoured the Turk."
"Turk" also served as a handy catch-all term of insult.
An Elizabethan could vouch for his character or his word
by swearing he was not a Turk. lago in Othello declares
to Desdemona that he means what he says, "or else I am
—
a Turk" that is, a liar. Turks were evil, shifty, not to be
trusted; Hamlet speculates on his shifting luck as he won-
ders, "if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me .
."
.

The less the English knew, the more they feared, and
the readier they were to assume the worst. Islam was for
pagans. The Turkish Empire, because it was a vague but
frightening threat on the fringes of Europe, was peopled
by supersoldiers of unearthly stamina and power. And the
Turkish people, never seen on a London street, were lust-
ful, cruel barbarians. Was it any wonder that Turks in the
sixteenth century kept a safe distance from England?

Out of Africa

The Elizabethans actually had a chance to scrutinize

black Africans, unlike the Turks, and could ponder the
mystery of their existence first-hand. Londoners saw their
first black men in the 1550s, when a few natives of Guinea
came out of Africa with an English explorer; all but one
—
returned home and that one married a white English-
woman and fathered a black child. But by 1601, Elizabeth
was so perturbed by the numbers of Africans "which are
crept into the realm" that she employed another foreigner,
a German merchant, to transport them out of England.
No one was quite sure what to make of the blacks who
appeared in sixteenth-century London. Gawking, gaping,
and rudely whispering as they glimpsed Africans on the
streets of London, the Elizabethans were especially curi-
ous about the dark skin of this unfamiliar people With
.

their usual zest' for argument and debate, they tackled the
question over and over. Some advocated the "climatic
—
theory" Africans were black because they lived near the
sun. The Prince of Morocco, recognizing this English prej-
 *

don't talk to strangers 55

udice, explains his dark skin to Portia on these grounds

in The Merchant of Venice: "MisHke me not for my com-
plexion, The shadowed liven,' of the burnished sun, To
whom I am a neighbor and near bred." The religious nar-
row-mindedly interpreted it as evidence of God's curse.
Evervone was especially intrigued by the fact that black
skin couldn't be washed off, no matter how much water
and soap were vigorously applied. In fact, "to wash an
Ethiop's skin" became a favorite metaphor for any point-
less task. In Love's Labor's Lost, Berowne gives this a neat
twist as he comments on the cosmetic-caked faces of Eng-
lishwomen; unlike his dark-skinned Rosaline, he declares
to his friends, "Your mistresses dare never come in rainr)^
For fear their colors should be washed away." —
Though curious, the English were generally uninformed
and xenophobic. They often lumped all dark-skinned
peoples together under a single name, completely obli-
vious to,or uninterested in, geographical and physical
differences. The terms "Moor," "blackamoor," "Ethiope,"
and "Negro" were interchangeable, despite the fact that
these peoples spanned the African continent. In TJie Mer-
chant of Venice, Lorenzo distastefully reveals this provin-
cialism when he accuses the servant Launcelot Gobbo of
"the getting up of the Negro's belly. The Moor is with child
by you, Launcelot."
If to be nonwhite was to be black, then to he black in
the prejudiced Elizabethan mind, was to be ug lv. English
standards of beauty called for red cheeks and white skin;
in Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis, the goddess of
love praises her "rose-cheeked Adonis" for being "more
white and red than doves or roses are." Black obviously
didn't have much of a place in this two-dimensional rose-
and-lily scheme. When Tamora, the Queen of the Goths,
gives birth to a black baby fathered by Aaron the Moor in
Titus Andronicus the Nurse laments, "A joyless, dismal,
,

black, and sorrowful issue! Here is the babe, as loathsome

as a toad Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime."
Apparently it didn't occur to many Elizabethans that
the pallid white flesh of the English might leave much to
be desired in some people's eyes. But Shakespeare lets
Aaron the Moor fiercely defend his dark-skinned baby: "is
black so base a hue? Sweet blowse, you are a beauteous
blossom, sure." And Berowne, whose beloved Rosaline is
 !

56 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

"black as ebony," is another exception when he chirps, I

"No face is Yet most Eliza-
fair that is not full so black."
bethans would probably agree with the King, who buys
into the myth that black equals evil as he answers Be-
rowne, "Black is the badge of hell, The hue of dungeons,
and the school of night."
Since the Elizabethans firmly believed that oufiy ard ,

appearance reflected inner realit y, to them, a bTack skin_^

mirrored a sinful sou l. As one "contemporary wrote, "A^
black soul may and doth take the shape of a blackmoor."
Indeed, as the "irreligious Moor" Aaron exults in his sav-
age crimes, he exclaims that he "will have his soul black
like his face." In As You Like It, Rosalind calls Phebe's
harsh words "Ethiope words, blacker in their effect Than
in their countenance."
Since ancient times, evil spirits and demons, especially
the Devil, had been portrayed with black skin. To the Eliz-
abethans, the logic seemed impeccable: since Satan was
black, it followed that black people were satanic. By thiS:.
>aiaaic-reiiSQILing, Africans were JM^^^hil rpiel savages who
lelighted in evil tor evil's sake.
XxTEliztibetli^ll ulllv had to pick up any of the nu-
merous travel accounts written by explorers to find a mul-
titude of these stereotyped images of blacks. Alongside
balanced and even impartial descriptions of the people of
—
Guinea "And albeit they go in manner all naked, yet are
many of them and especially their women, laden with
collars, bracelets, hoops and chains, either of gold, copper
—
or ivory" the Elizabethan reader could revel in stories of
Ethiopians who were eight feet tiigh, or had only one eye
in the middle of their foreheads/or had the heads of dogs.
The explorers were happy to provide their reading public
with descriptions of wild land^ and wilder monsters, such
as the tales Othello tells Desc^emona, "of antres vast and
Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads
deserts idle,
touch heaven And of th^e Cannibals that each other
. . .

eat. The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow

beneath their shoulders." J
More than one of these explorers saw only what they
wanted to see. Prejudiced by centuries-old myths and
childhood stories about strange African lands, a ship's
captain might persuade himself that he really had en-
countered such monsters and savages walking about on
 —
don't talk to strangers 57

the deserted shore. And whatever his EUzabethan imagi-

nation couldn't supply, ancient volumes by such Greek
geographers as Herodotus and Pliny could, with fantastic
descriptions galore.
Rarely did the Elizabethans stretch their lively minds
beyond their own rigid preconceptions to try to under-
stand black Afiicans for what they were it^wa s far easier
;

tn rpjf Pt tti^rr. for }yY\^t thf^y ix/f^rP not ]^T ( -hnsT Jan, nOt ""
white, and not English Because African peoples embodied
.

a ditterentJandor beau tvandJivedJ societvbuiltac^

[Q''a,jiSlcrem_^uEliral. ecoaQmicr^aCT"reIigiQU£
^t^jirly'rd_the^;__^i^re dismissed an^disdainejl Simplistic'
and simplifying stereot^es oFblack Africans flourished in
the foggy, raw, and dull climate of Elizabethan England.
Despite such prejudices, Shakespeare was one of the
first playwrights to create a leading role for a black char-
acter. Even though he reflected the conditions of his time,
he was unique in producing two roles, one for a black and
— —
one for a Jew Othello and Shylock that are among the
greatest and most challenging roles in English drama. Liv-
ing as he did in the narrow-minded society of sixteenth-
century England, Shakespeare may not have intended
Othello to be portrayed by a black man. But it is a measure
of his genius that some of our greatest contemporary' black
actors — including Paul Robeson and James Earl Jones
have performed the role, giving it a modem resonance
that Shakespeare couldn't have imagined. Nowhere was
this clearer than in Johannesburg, where a black South
African actor played Othello in a recent production that
made a powerful statement against racial prejudice.

Joining the Jews

A YOUNG Jew of Spanish or Portuguese descent, looking

around for a friendly countrv' to live in after the horrors
of the Catholic Inquisition, would certainly think twice
about going to England, for every Jew knew about the
terrible suffering his people had endured in medieval En-
gland. In the Middle Ages, English Jews weren't allowed
to own land, master a craft, or ply most trades. Many of
 ! —
58 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

them became moneylenders by default encouraged by a

,

society that jieeded crgdij desperatel y but was forbidden

t.Q_ctiai:ge_interest. But it wasn't longbefore the Englisl
began to resent the affluence moneylending brought the
Jews. In addition to financial envy, there was hostility
toward their non-Christian religious practices.
Sometimes hostility swelled into violence, as Jewish
homes were plundered and Jewish families massacred
despite the nominal protection of the English Crown. By
the late 1200s, the Jews' financial reserves were exhausted
by heavy and unjust taxes and their emotional reserves
were drained by chronic harassment. No longer useful
to English society, they were banished in 1290 — sixteen
thousand people forced to leave England almost imme-
diately.
Reflecting on this history, our young Spanish or Por-
tuguese Jew might decide instead to sail for the safety of
the well-established Jewish community in Antwerp, Bel-
gium, making a stopover at Dover, England, along the
way. But once in England, he might hear about a small
Jewish community in London and choose to join their
—
number probably less than a hundred. After his awful
double existence in Spain, where his family had lived se-
cretly as Jews and publicly as "New Christians," or Mar-
ranos, he might be overjoyed to find even a few Jews,
especially since they, too, were exiles from Spain and Por-
tugal.
The small community of Jews in Elizabethan London
had worked out a relatively comfortable coexistence with
Protestant England. ^Lan^LQf th em were docto r^^, mpr-
chants,_iiade rs, and p rominent citizeris in the citv-JDut-
warHIy Tof course, xheyxonformed. as everyone had to by
'

tli'e iaw of the lan(iTlie>nFaUmiilly attended Sunday ser-

vices at the Protestant Church of Saint Olave's down the

street and even held their marriages and funerals there.
But once a week, they trod the cobbled streets of the sec-
tion of London known as Aldgate and, behind the closed
doors of the home of a Portuguese Jew, quietly held Sab-
bath prayers. As a Spanish subject imprisoned in London
eventually reported to his government, "It is notorious that
in their own homes they live as such observing their Jew-
ish rites; but publicly they attend Lutheran [Protestant]
churches, and listen to the sermons."
 don't talk to str.\\gers 59

They knew that to keep their Jewish identify thev ha d

^njceej^Jt qiiiet that heing lew-ish in the eyes oft he aii-
JJTo ntieswas better than being outright Jews Still, a nag-
.

ging sense of insecurity remained. In the first place, they

didn't really have any legal ground to stand on —
the decree
of banishment handed down in 1290 wasn't officially re-
pealed until 1650, and the government could have kicked
them out at any time. In the second place, the English
annals of anti-Semitism were too full and well thumbed
for any Jew to think that the prejudic e had v anished from
the land. In Christian eyes, they were^fidel^ ust as Turks
and Moors were If "Turk" meant "cruel" and treacherous,"
.

then "Jev y" '^tonr for "viliamous' and "nntni<;t\vm-tl^'

l

Benedick uses this construction to declare his intentions

toward Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing: "If I do not"!
take pity of her, I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am V^
a Jew."
The Jew was automatically assumed by the English to
be inferior to the Christian. The ser\,'ant Launce makes
this explicit when he issues an invitation to his fellow
senant Speed in Tlie Two Gentlemeyi of Verona: "If thou
wilt, go with me to the alehouse; if not, thou art an He-
brew, a Jew, and not worth the name of a Christian."
Elizabethan institutions everx-where seemed to support
and encourage these derogator\- notions about Jews. The
Church teachings held that the Jewish people were not
only shifty infidels but also the treacherous murderers of
'

Christ, a belief officially repudiated by the Pope in the

19605. The writers of the time adopted the old medieval
stereotypes of wicked Jews; Thomas Nashe's 77?^ Unfor-
tunate Traveller presented Zachar\- and Zadoch, two dia-
bolical medieval Jews who gleefully threaten to poison
wells and murder Christian children —
supposedly favorite
Jewish pastimes and the cause of many an anti-Jewish
riot in the Middle Ages.
Most pla\Avrights, too, chose one of two caricatures
when they came to depict Jews onstage: either a comically
w ith a red wig, big nose, and devil-like features,
ug;ly figure
or a horrendouslv bloodthirsty and scheming yillain^ such
as Christopher Marlowe's Barabas, the/eav ofMalta. Shake-
speare's Shylock in Tlie Merchant of Venice is a possible
exception.
Although generally no one bothered the Jews, there
 !

60 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

were a few incidents with unpleasant implications. The

affair of Dr. Lopez was notorious and reverberated long
after its conclusion. Roderigo Lopez, a well-known mem-
ber of the Jewish community, had been Queen Elizabeth's
trusted physician for years when the trouble started; as a
Portuguese Jewish immigrant, he had also been invaluable
to the government in foreign policy matters relating to
Portugal. After years of faithful and honorable service to
Elizabeth, during which she granted him a manor house
twelve miles from Shakespeare's Stratford, Lopez was ac-
cused of plotting to poison her.
He swore he was innocent, but he was a convenient
scapegoat in the power struggle between the queen's
favorites. Done in by the combination of backstabbing
'
Elizabethan politics and anti-Semitism (the State Papers
referred to him throughout as "the vile Jew"), Lopez was
— —
convicted on trumped-up charges and executed in May
of 1594. The execution was a major public event and set
off ripples of anti-Jewish feeling around the nation that
took some time to fade.
There were a few other incidents, although none as big
as the Lopez travesty. A German miner who openly pro-
fessed Judaism lived in England with no problem until he
got into a theological argument with a clergyman; after
fifteen years of keeping his mouth shut, he was expelled
from the country.
But in some respects Elizabethans seemed glad that
the Jews were around —
especially English merchants and
traders. Tews made excellent shippin^LJi stents and-mlddte
men in English t radinp activities with Pr>r|^]pal an^ .^pain
^

*TCunfionted witTi the desire and need to trade with Spain,

England's number-one enemy, these resourceful English-
men kept their hands clean by employing Jews as "secret"
agents. When Spanish goods left Spain as exports for En-
gland, they would technically "belong" to the Jewish ship-
pers, who were originally from Portugal or Spain; but by
the time they arrived in England as imports, they would
have become the property of the English merchants who
had financed the voyage in the first place.
Elizabeth's government also benefitted from the pres-
ence of Jews, for they brought to foreign policy matters
the invaluable combination of knowledge and passion. As
ex-citizens of Spain and Portugal who still kept up with
 1

don't talk to strangers 6

with their old communities there, many Jews in London

were experts on Spanish and Portuguese affairs and in-
dispensable sources of intelligence information. Because
they had been brutally expelled from Spain in 1492 (and
the hidden ones who remained hunted down by the In-
quisition ever since then), many of them were zealously
—
anti-Spanish which fit right in with English foreign policy.
Although the life of the Jews in Elizabethan England
was .legally unsta ble and vulnera ble to waves of anti-
SemitisnL by Shakes iJeaie's liiiie lUings__wej;e n't so b ad
As long as thev"lna£le--dieir JeWTsliness a private matter
publicly fulfilling the minimiliii daily I'e quirements of cit
izenship in a Protestant land, the Jews were for the most
part tolerated, although they remained outsiders.
*
Armadas and Armados

IfSpanish Jews were guided by signs instructing them to

Proceed With Caution and Yield to Oncoming Traffic,
Spanish Catholics coming to England would have been
greeted by billboards screaming Keep Out! It had been
that way for a long time. Even when the Spanish King
Philip married the English Queen Mary, during a decade
when both the ruler and the Church of England were
Catholic, Spanish visitors had been given a cold reception.
After Elizabeth and the Protestant Church were en-
throned in 1558-1559, that chill became a downright frost.
In Elizabethan London, in fact, a Spanish face was a rare
sight; unless he were the Spanish ambassador to the Court,
or a sailor on a merchant ship, or, in 1588, a would-be
invader aboard one of the ships in the Spanish Armada,
it would be extremely unlikely that a Spaniard would ven-

ture into English waters.

Religious differences may have been at the heart of
what was really a mutual dislike: J^rotestantism and Ca-
tholicism w ere to these two worl d powers what Democ-^
jacv andTAJlniiiuiiiMii aiu LO twentieth-century super-""'
powers^ But it was not religion alone; in that era,^r^li^ioi3^
ari^j2oli^c^,.ivejiejn§^£^L^^ The English might not have
thougKttwice about Spanish Catholicism if Spain hadn't
 !

62 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

also happened to be the greatest poHtical and mihtary

power in the world.
It was probably as much en\T as fear that caused Eliz-
abethans to believe that Spain was an evil empire that
—
intended to take over the whole globe beginning, of course,
with England. Ever\- move the Spaniards made on the
chessboard of international relations was seized on as evi-
dence of their diabolical intentions. For example, the En-
glish saw right through the Spanish invasion of Spain's
rebelling colonies in the Netherlands; what Spain was really
trying to do was to build up its militars power across the
Channel.
To English minds, Spain was an evil second only to
the Devil, and they never passed up a chance to vilifv' their
hated rival. Accordingly, Spaniards were described as a
bloodthirsty, greedy, cruel, and bigoted lot who would let
no one prevent them from attaining their evil ends. They
fed Indian babies to their equally bloodthirsty dogs while
out conquering the New World and held contests to see
who could disembowel a man fastest. They took extraspe-
cial delight in torturing Protestants— although they might
be hard put to outdo the diabolical English torturer of
Catholics, Richard Topcliffe.
When the Elizabethans weren't busily engaged in
Spanish character assassination, they concentrated on
mocking and ridiculing the hapless Spaniards. They might
have simply been following the example of their queen:
rumor had it that Elizabeth considered the Spanish am-
bassador a pompous fool and made fun of him whenever
the opportunity presented itself. Perhaps he wasn't so dif-
ferent from the Shakespearean Spaniard in Love's Labor's
Lost —Don Adriano de Armado, "a refined traveler of Spain,
A man in all the world's new fashion planted. That hath
a mint of phrases in his brain," and preposterous bombast
on his lips: "Arts-man, preambulate," he trumpets, "we
will be singuled from the barbarous."
Both Don Armado, in his own swaggering way, and
the more serious matter of the Invincible Armada pro-
vided the Elizabethans with entertainment that was hard
to beat; neither Armado nor Armada did ver\- much to
improve the English opinion of Spain. After the highly-
publicized fear-inspiring Spanish fleet met its end on the
Irish rocks, it was hard for Spaniards to hold their heads
 don't talk to STR.ANGERS 63

up in the international set; and England went mad with

the sweet taste of victor\-. Gloating ballads and pamphlets
streamed from English presses, proclaiming the victory
as final proof that God really was an Englishman after
all —and a Protestant at that. Relations between the two
countries continued to worsen. The raids of English pir-
ates on Spanish cargo ships were frequent occuiTcnces
for years afterward.
And the legends of Spanish cruelty and bloodthirsti-
ness continued to enjoy quite a following. Anti-Spanish
pamphlets made the rounds in London; one, entitled A
Fig for the Spaniard, described Spain as the natural habitat
of those "that like bloody butchers continually thirst after
blood." It would take a long time for tensions to ease.
Until then, Spaniards preferred to stay put at home, safe
—
from English swords and English pens!

Dutch Treat, Petty France

The Protestant religious refugees who made their way

into England might have expected to be welcomed with
open arms. After all, they weren't Turks or Africans, Jews
or Catholics, but good old Protestants. The King of Spain
was fle.xing his Catholic muscles in the Netherlands, and
France was thrown into a religious uproar on the death
of its king in the 1570s; European Protestants were in
trouble and called on their fellow Protestants in England
for help.
But if religious differences ebbed with this particular

tide of immigrants, economic jealousies flowed right in to

take their place. These Dutch and French Protestants
couldn't have picked a worse time to descend upon their
Protestant neighbors than the last quarter of the sixteenth
century. England had been periodically racked with fa-
mine, unemployment, and trade slumps, and the Eliza-
bethans were in no mood to receive groups of destitute
foreigners who arrived on their shores exhausted, fright-
ened, and penniless —
and also, it soon emerged, skilled.
—
Evidently the queen always anxious to swell the Prot-
estant ranks —
was happy to see these refugees flooding
 !

64 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

English shores and EngHsh churches. Perhaps she reahzed

that they could bring desperately-needed skills to her bat-
tered economy. And so, glossing over the diplomatic sen-
sitivity of England's welcoming political/religious exiles
from allied or rival nations, she declared, "They are all
welcome; I at least will never fail them." Many of her top
advisors felt the same way, extending warm greetings, well
aware of the potential economic improvements to En-
gland's backwardness in manufacture and industry.
Unfortunately, the Dutch and French immigrants
couldn't live their daily lives among their high-level spon-
sors. Life among the ordinary Elizabethans — farmers,
shopkeepers, artisans, weavers, merchants, and apprentices
— wasn't always a cozy affair. Many of them resented the
refugees simply because they were strangers, others en-
vied their skills and workmanship, and no one was par-
ticularly shy about making his feelings known.
As a result, depending on the city or village, the Dutch
and the French refugees found themselves stung by lots
of little irritations and petty restrictions. Unscrupulous
landlords might jack up the rent for a family of strangers,
sometimes charging them seven times as much as a native
English tenant. Some villages enforced an eight o'clock
evening curfew for immigrants; in others, foreign-bom
bakers could bake and sell only the inferior wheat bread,
while the English bakers enjoyed the monopoly on the
more popular white bread. And elsewhere, alien weavers
had to swallow their anger and pay "loom money" for
—
permission to weave on top of taxes that might already
be twice as much as the Elizabethans paid.
Foreign craftsmen could hire only English apprentices
— —
a requirement of the law but the English certainly
didn't have to respond in kind by hiring Dutch or French
apprentices. Craftsmen from abroad also had to submit
to regular monitoring by a supervisory committee of
—
Englishmen yet another Elizabethan maneuver to ex-
tract as many secrets as they could from the foreigners
and thus prevent them from gaining a monopoly.
Indeed, the main source of Elizabethan antagonism
toward Protestant refugees was fear of foreigners' money-
making potential. For as one foreigner noted, the English
suspected that most foreigners "never come into their is-
land but to make themselves masters of it, and to usurp
 don't talk to strangers 65

their goods"; and when foreigners were as competent and

knowledgeable as these Europeans, suspicions were even
greater. The immigrants were resented for surpassing their
Elizabethan hosts "in dexterity, industry, and frugality,"
as one fair-minded Englishman said.
And so, instead of tolerating these skilled strangers,
many Elizabethans demonstrated their own industry- — in
making scapegoats of vulnerable groups. The unfortunate
Dutch and French workers were blamed for food short-
ages, price rises, housing shortages, rent increases, and
anything else that went wrong.
Sometimes, when Elizabethans could no longer bear
the burden of their inferiority, resentment shortened their
tempers, turning to riot. English apprentices were usually
the engineers of these free-for-alls, leading the way as they
smashed market stalls, plundered strangers' goods, and
turned their beefy fists on anyone who looked foreign.
After three terrible riots in ten years, the government fi-
nally cracked down on the apprentices and sentenced five
of them to hang. Things quieted down after that.
Actually these Protestant refugees, who gave up every-
thing for their religious principles, had a good measure
of religious freedom in England. They lived in their own
—
communities London had an area that was called "Petty
France" because of all the Frenchmen living there and —
kept their lives separate but parallel to the English. They
attended their own worship services apart from the En-
glish. They maintained their own baptismal and marriage
records, took care of their own poor, and were even ex-
cused from the law requiring weekly attendance at Church
of England services.
And so, within the shelter of their communities, they
went quietly about their business, despite occasional re-
sistance from the ungrateful English. Gradually, grudg-
ingly, the Elizabethans began to learn from these thrifty,
talented craftsmen. The refugees showed their English
pupils how to weave silk, make ribbon, and engrave glass;
they taught them how to make canvas, parchment, soap,
combs, and buttons. The immigrants demonstrated effi-
cient techniques of copper-mining, knife-making, harbor-
dredging, and marsh-draining. And one of them revolu-
tionized English fashion when she introduced the practice
of starching linen. After that, the upper classes never again
 !

66 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

had to worry about floppy ruffs, and Mrs. Dingham van der
—
Plasse never again had to worry about money she grew
rich practically overnight.

Local Habitations

Elizabethans were so sensitive to anything foreign or

strange that they reacted even to people who came from
no farther away than the remote parts of their own islands.
Although a Scotsman or an Irishman or a Welshman might
— —
not stand out at first for he looked English the minute
he opened his mouth he gave the game away. Regional
accents were very strong and immediately recognizable,
especially to Londoners who spoke the standard southern
dialect thatwas considered "correct." Whether or not the
English reacted with their customary hostility to foreign-
ers when they heard such a "foreign" accent on the street,
they certainly found these country yokels uproariously
funny on the stage.
A Welsh citizen might be laughed at for the way he
stumbled over his p's and b's, his d's and i^s; Sir Hugh
Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor calls to the fairies,
"Trib, trib, fairies. Come ... Be pold, I pray you." Or he
might have reported to his military captain with the classic
pronunciation of a Fluellen, in Henry V: "there is gallant
and most prave passages. Marry, th' athversary was have
possession of the pridge."
An Irishman's distinctive accent never deserted him,
nor did it ever fail to raise a laugh. Shakespeare has a lot
of fun with MacMorris, an Irish comrade-in-arms of Fluel-
len: "I would have blowed up the town, so Chrish save me,
la, in an hour. O, tish ill done, tish ill done; by my hand,
tish ill done!" Nor did Scots get off scot-free; their broad
vowels struck their southern neighbors in London as hi-
larious. The Scottish captain Jamy assures Fluellen and
MacMorris that "It sail be vary gud, gud feith, gud captens
bath." The conversations that occur between these three
officers in the army of Henr\' V are a comical smorgasbord
of incomprehensible vowels, idiosyncratic speech man-
nerisms, and oddly-pronounced words.
 don't talk to strangers 67

In the end, no matter what flag of race, creed, or na-

tionahty the immigrants waved, Hfe couldn't have been
easy for strangers in a country that considered even its
own fellow islanders foreigners. The fab ric of English so-
ciety was woven so tightly that irseerne^Trj exclude anv"
jjne who wasnt white, Anglo Saxon. Protestant — ^^^d m^ \^
For although Elizabeth sat on the throne, everywhere else
in England a woman was just as much a second-class
citizen as any stranger.
 CHAPTER 5

Like a Virgin:
Queen Elizabeth
AND THE Status of
Women
The biggest riddle of all,in a society that was riddled
with riddles, was how a woman could rule the nation
while all other women held such a low status. A woman
in sixteenth-century England had no vote, few legal rights,
and an extremely limited chance of ever getting an edu-
cation, much less a job. There was no room for the in-
—
dependent single woman except, of course, in the throne
room.

Women's Studies

An abundance of forces conspired to keep women in

their place. For one thing, most women were denied
the_£ha«CC to bo-sch ooled bey nn H t|-|P ha«^ir<; Tr ue manv
liew grammar schools were being founded as Eliza-
bethans embraced Renaissance learning. But most of
them had Male Only signs on the door; the few that did
accept girls usually gave them a softer, easier course
of study. What was unusual for the grammar schools
was unthinkable for the universities of Oxford and Cam-
bridge; in fact, these two famous institutions didn't offer
degrees to women equivalent to those they gave to men
 LIKE A VIRGIN: QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN 69

until the twentieth centur\' — Oxford in 1920, Cambridge

in 1948!
No, the ^Qst an ordinary young Elizabethan woman
could hope for was to pick up basic readin g and writing ,
skills at the local village schop l. After that, sne waved good-
bye to her brothers ever\' morning as they went off to the
grammar school, if the family could spare them.
Things were different in the upper classes. Gentry
families often hired tutors to come into their homes
and teach their daughters. Baptista showed himself a
considerate father in 77?^ Taming of the Shrew, for he
"took some care To get her [his daughter Bianca] cunning
schoolmasters to instruct her"; Lucentio and Hortensio
both take advantage of this upper-class practice, disguis-
ing themselves as schoolmasters to get into Baptista's house
and woo Bianca! She, of course, proves to be a more
assertive pupil than they had bargained for, insisting, "V
am no breeching scholar in the schools; I'll not be tied
to hours nor 'pointed times, But learn my lessons as I
"
please myself."
A number of wealthy families, rather than keeping their
daughters at home, placed them in other wealthy house-
holds to be tutored. And Prospero, tutorless on the un-
inhabited island of The Tempest, teaches his daughter
himself: "here Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more
profit Than other princess' can, that have more time For
vainer hours and tutors not so careful."
In any case, some rich Elizabethan girls gained access
through their tutors to ancient languages and ancient
literature — —
both classical and biblical ^just as their broth-
ers did. An Italian Catholic disparaged the motives behind
this: "The rich cause their sons and daughters to learn
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, for since this storm of [Prot-
estant] heresy has invaded the land, they hold it useful to
read the Scriptures in the original tongue."
Whatever the motives, the richer classes produced some
—
impressive daughters Lady Jane Grey, who would rather
read Plato than go hunting with her parents in the park;
Anne Bacon, who at the tender age of twenty-two pub-
lished translations of twenty-five Latin sermons about the
theological doctrine of predestination; and Marv Sidney,
the translator of French tragedy and versifier of Hebrew
 — !

70 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

psalms, who cultivated a circle of literary men and schol-

ars at her stately home.
The fairest of them all, of course, and a valuable role
model for the upper classes, was Queen Elizabeth, who
had studied Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Flem-
ish, mathematics, astronomy, and history by the time she
was twelve! Her command of languages was legendary;
her old schoolteacher said he once saw her reply simul-
taneously to three different ambassadors in three different
languages (Italian to one, French to the next, and Latin
to the third), without missing a beat. Everyone knew the
story of how she told off the stunned ambassador from
Poland in a stream of spur-of-the-moment Latin and then —
turned around to the Court and apologized for being slightly
rusty!
The headmaster of the exclusive all-male school Eton
observed that it was becoming the fashion at Elizabeth's

court for women to engage in intellectual pursuits: "It is

now no news at all," he declares, "to see the queen and
ladies .instead of courtly dalliance, to embrace virtuous
. .

exercises of reading and writing, and ... to apply them-

selves to the acquiring of knowledge in both liberal arts
and Scriptures."

And yet there were limits even for wo rnen^om th e

,

up2er classes. Their education wasTrTpreparmg them to'

"^goorrto a^uTiiversity, or to become a doctor, priest, or
politician; instead, it was outfitting them for life in the ,

domestic sphere. R ather than history, grammar, and logic,

most Elizabethan girls were given instruction in piety,
chastity, and "home economics." The schoolteacher Rich-
ard Mulcaster uttered the prevailing opinion when he said
that a woman should learn "to govern and direct her
household, to look to her house and family ... to know
the force of her kitchen. ." Another cookbook warned,
. .

"Let no body loathe the name of the kitchen."

Spinning, cooking, preserving fruits, keeping accounts,
doing needlework, weaving, playing musical instruments
— ^Tiything that made home life more pleasan t were —
considered indispensable elements of every upper-class
girl's education. Helena gives a glimpse of a girl's studies
when, in the middle of a fight with her best friend Hermia
in A Midsummer Night's Dream, she appeals to their "all
 LIKE A virgin: QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN 7 1

schooldays' friendship" when the two of them "with our

needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sit-
ting on one cushion. Both warbling of one song, both in
one key." Desdemona was similarly schooled, if we can
believe Othello
— "So delicate with her needle. An admi-
rable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a
bear. Of so high and plenteous wit and invention."
Domestic skills were the staples of an Elizabetha n gir^'^
educatio m all the rest was frivolit y. Elizabeth's successor,
KTrrg^James, made this startlingly clear: when he was in-
troduced to an accomplished young woman praised for
her knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, his only com-
ment was, "But can she spin?" A girl's knowledge of an-
cient languages was widely considered ornamental. After
all, women would never have any practical use for Latin

—
or Greek in the political or business world but the oc-
casional Greek aphorism or Latin tag did set off the wom-
anly graces quite nicely.
There were plenty of doomsayers who worried about
the consequences of giving women any learning whatso-
ever. One writer compared a woman with an education
to a madman with a sword: you just couldn't tell what
she'd do with it! Others fretted that chaste young women
would compromise their virtue by reading the racy tales
of Ovid or equally risque medieval romances. "Let not your
girl learn Latin," parents were solemnly warned.
The final insult to women was that jhe rare few who
^
managed to do snr^^t^^ng M^nrth^hil^ with their educa-
tion (translating the Psalms, for example), were not praised
as educated women but were instead welcomed to the
company of men Sir Thomas More's daughter, Meg Ko-
!

per, was so well-educated "that she may compare with any

notable man." Lady Falkland was remembered after her
death as "a woman of most masculine understanding."
The daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke were brought up
"learning both Greek and Latin, above their sex." Even
Queen Elizabeth was the recipient of such a back-handed
compliment: a sermon preached after her death celebrated
"her masculine graces of learning, valor, and wisdom by
which she might justly challenge to be the queen of men!"
Apparently it never occurred to these writers and preach- "~7
ers that a woman could be ntellipf^nt rapab le. or wise
j
j (

and still remain female. _j

 —
72 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

Women's Work

Educated or not, a woman always ran up against the one

immutable fact of Elizabethan life: she would never be
able to enter th e professions because she was a woman.
,

She coulJn't become a lawyer. She couldn't be a priest

in fact, some clergymen were still debating heatedly whether
or not womenev^DJa^dsouls. She couldn't be a profes-
sional feScEerTalthouglTsIie^could take care of her own
children's early education. And she couldn't be a doctor;
if she wanted to work in medicine she could find a job as

an overworked nurse in one of the squalid London hos-

pitals, a midwife in a village, or a "searcher" for the cause
of disease in dead bodies.
The only career open to all Rlizabethan women was
jparriage; a wife's job was to run the household and help
her husband in whatever he did. Her work varied accordng
to his. The tasks of a farmer's wife were "to go or ride to
the market to sell butter, cheese, milk, eggs, chickens . . .

and all manner of com. And also to buy all manner of

necessary things belonging to a household." The shop-
keeper's wife helped in the shop, perhaps keeping the ac-
count books, and made sure the household ran smoothly.
Poor women's work was spinning and weaving.
Upper-class wives, with a houseful of servants to tend
to domestic matters, often had much more free time. The
most popular activities of such women were writi ng let -
j:ers^ singing, da ncing, strollin g in the garden, pTayirig
"^
with dainty littl?pet dogs, an3^pm4ftg-iJver needlework-—
'everythmg their education had piepaied CKem for. Al-
though some wives subsisted on the pious diet of religious
sermons and the Bible, one upper-class woman spent an
entire evening in her husband's chamber reading Turkish
history and the poetry of Chaucer.
One foreigner thought that the freedom and leisure of
these upper-class Elizabethan women qualified England
as "the paradise of married women," elaborating: "They
spend their free time in walking and riding, in playing at
cards or otherwise, in visiting their friends and keeping
company, conversing with their equals (whom they term
gossips) and making merry with them at childbirths, chris-
 LIKE A virgin: QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN 73

tenings, churchings, and funerals; and all this with the

permission and knowledge of their husbands."

Second-class

But that last phrase about "the permission of their hus-

bands" was the sticky bit for many an Elizabethan woman:
—
whatever freedom she had was granted and taken^a^^ay
— by her husban d. All the current notions about Ihe^ kiear^
cm amage!g ave hnfi this authority. He was the prince witli
,

—
power and his wife was his loyal, loving subject. Kate
makes this perfectly clear at the end of 77?^ Taming of the
Shrew as she lectures the other women on wifely duties:
J^"Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, Thy head,
7 thy sovereign; And craves no other tribute at thy hands
. . .

^But love, fair looks, and true obedience." In this scheme,

the b^d wife was a dj^'^berlipnt «;iibjprt; Kate goes on:
"Such duty as the subject owes the prince. Even such a^
woman oweth to her husband; And when she is froward,
peevish, sullen, sour. And not obedient to his honest will, n
What is she but a foul contending rebel And graceless/
traitor t o her loving lord?"
Both \Church and State) supported this premise. The
Church a rpn ed that H vg- had played the principal role in
the fall of man. SainiPaul had a few words to say in the
New Testament about the duty of women in marriage.
"Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection," he
advised, "But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp
authority over the man, but to be in silence ." Elsewhere
he urged obedience: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your
own husbands." Young wives who followed Paul's writings
were "discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to
their own husbands."
Elizabeth's successor King James enshrined the hus-
band's authority in a book of advice he wrote for his son.
In marriage, he said, "Ye are the head, she is your body:
it is your office to command, and hers to obey; but yet

with such a sweet harmony, as she should be as ready to

obey, as ye to command."
Wifely inferiority got a further endorsement from the
 "

74 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

Oaw]X)ne foreign observer commented that "wives in En-

gland are entirely in the power of their husbands, their
lives only excepted. 3^^hen a woman got married, she tra-
ditionally lost all control over ner property, even including
clothes and j ewelry; her husband could sell them, throw
t hem out, or give tnem a way as he plpas;pg, Hnrtin ^iir-^

"fenders her wealth to her beloved Bassanio without a peep

in The Merchant of Venice: '^Myself^and^ wh^t i^4nirie tj
_you-^nd.^ui:s^jsi>o;^v_cpQvej
In giving upKer property, the wife often became her
husband's property: Petruchio claims his Kate in The Tam-
ing of the Shrew with these proprietany^ words: "She is my~l
goods, my chattels; she is my house. My household stuff, M
my field, my bam. My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing."—^ '

When a wife died, her husband inherited all her lands; if

he was the to go, however, she got only ^n^^jhircj of
first
his. She hadto take her husband's surname; a contem-
porary writer reflected playfully, "ShF that m
the morning
was Fairweather, is at night, perhaps Rainbow or Good-
wife [Mrs.] Foule." She also had to assume his rank in '
society even if it was lower than hers; it she married one
,

of her servants, for example, he became a free man and

—
her master in one sweeping motion "where before he
was her footstool, he is now her head and seignior [master]."
The legal cards were so stacked against women that one
observer was provoked to say, "Methinks here wanteth
equality in law." Unfortunately, there wasn't much to be
done about it; the Act of Parliament necessary to confer
legal equality would be a long time in coming.

Any legal loopholes that might have left some doubt

as to women's inferior status were amply filled in by the
teachings of^^Togj^ The theory of the four humors or —
liquids —
stated that women's bodies had a greater pro-
portion of the cold and moist humor's (while men's bodies
consisted primarily of the hot SOTdry humors). This meant
that women were passive timid, nnH hnritnting
, —
fit tO b^ _
^dommated hv men Tn Hp yiry VI Part 3, the Duke of York
denies that his cruel captor Margaret can really be a woman,
for "Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible; Thou stem,
obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless."
The supposed yielding softness and frailty of women's
bodies was all the proof anyone needed of women's all-
 LIKE A virgin: QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN 75

around weakness, for most Elizabethans firmly believed

that "the disposit ion of thern ind is n nswiernhlp to t.b^
te mper oJ: the body ." m
other words, outer appearance
was merely a reflection of inner condition One Elizabethan
.

spelled it out: "A woman in the temperature of her body

is tender, soft, and beautiful, so doth her disposition in
mind correspond accordingly; she is mild, yielding, and
virtuous." Or, as Isabella cries to Angelo in Measure for
Measure, "Nay, call us ten times frail, For we are soft as
our complexions are, And credulous to false prints."
Indeed, the softer the body, the greater the beauty.
Ivory' skin, rosy cheeks, a round face, rounder hips, and
yielding flesh were all requirements for the beautiful woman.
—
Modem standards of womanly beauty tanned, thin, and
—
bony would have struck an Elizabethan fashion plate as
very odd indeed. \(^r^MMjLj^\
Of course, complexions aren't perfect in any age; and
when Nature refused to deliver, women resorted to various
chemicals to conjure up the necessary paleness of skin
and rosiness of cheek. They began with a base not the —
beige, skin-colored foundation some women use today,
but a greasy chemical made of white lead or sulphur,
which often had a withering effect on the skin. They smeared
this base lavishly over their faces, necks, and upper chests.
On top of the white went various dyes to redden the cheeks;
these, too, were caked on Beauty spots were drawn
heavily.
on the cheeks in strategic locations,eyebrows plucked to
a dainty thinness, and lips thickly lipsticked. After her hair
was powdered, pinned, and perfumed, and the perfumed
gloves put on, the Elizabethan lady was ready to face so-
ciety. Shakespeare plays on both meanings of "face-paint-
ing" in the final scene of The Winter's Tale: "The ruddiness
upon her lip is wet," Paulina warns Leontes as he gazes
at the "statue" of his wife Hermione, "You'll mar it if you
kiss it, stain your own With oily painting."
Not everyone thought that this face-painting was such
a great idea. Puritans thought it was an abomination to
try to improve one's God-given appearance: Elizabethan
women, one writer fumed, "color their faces with certain
oils, liquors, unguents [ointments] and waters whereby
they think their beauty is greatly decored [decorated]."
And Hamlet speaks for many an opponent of makeup when
he says scornfully to Ophelia, "I have heard of your paint-
 d
76 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

ings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and
you make yourselves another."

The standards of inner beauty for women were no more

accommodating to variety than those of outer beauty. The
recipe for a good woman included ingredients of obedi-
ence, patience, chastity, modesty, and vir|np. MirandaTnT
The lempest, calls her modesty the most important quality
she has, "the jewel in my dower." TaJJ^aiivewgrnenwere^
no t^ consid p;:e4-MdUA;;__and lpajTied^~5Tij iiu^le ^amTmiDlii
^ ^t _ and sh rpvv ish Launce intones in Two Gentlemen of
.

Verona, "To besTow in words is a woman's only virtue."

Indeed, women who spoke their minds too assertively ran
the risk of making themselves unattractive to men: Kate
p warns her fellow wives in The Taming of the Shrew, "A
woman moved is like a fountain troubled. Muddy, ill-
seeming, thick, bereft of beauty; And while it is so, none
- so dry or thirsty Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it."
Usually, an Elizabethan female who didn't live up to
these specifications of submissiveness and silence was la-
beled as a "bad woman," one of several types. She might
have been the shrew who nagged, scolded, and ordered
her henpecked husband around. In TJie Comedy of Errors,
Antipholus of Ephesus apologizes to his friends for having
to run out on them but excuses himself on the grounds
that "My wife is shrewish when I keep not hours." As Kate
learns, shrews had to be tamed, for they created household
havoc and, worse, represented a reversal of the natural
order. Lady Macbeth is a formidable and decidedly un-
funny version of a woman who dominates her weak-willed
husband.
Those who didn't fit into the <.hrew cate^ rv might be
considere d lustful seductresses w ho welcomed any chance
to cheat on their husbands. The ageless fear of wearing
the horns of the "cuckold" (the man whose wife had com-
mitted adultery) was probably the single biggest anxiety
of Elizabethan married men. Certainly Shakespeare's men
worry about it. Master Ford, in The Merry Wives of Wind-
sor, suffering under the delusion that his wife is commit-
ting adultery with Falstaff, cries in anger, "See the hell of
having a false woman!" Master Ford is not alone in judging
his wife to be the unfaithful seductress: Leontes doubts
Hermione's integrity in The Winter's Tale, Claudio jilts Hero^
 LIKE A virgin: QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN 77

in Much Ado About Nothing on the grounds that she's be en

carrvinr nn ;Nith^nmpnn'" f|<;p, anH Othplln'^ jpalnngy anri"
suspicion of his wife Desdemona end in murder.
If ever a woman dared to threaten male authority by
talking back, showing independence of mind, or even
wearing men's fashions, men usually had a strong reac-
tion. Toward the end of the century it took the popular
form of pamphlets against women. No doubt the Eliza-
bethan women who could read them didn't know whether
to laugh or cr\' at all the stereotypes, simplifications, and
gross exaggerations contained in these booklets.
There was the old chestnut about women having only
two faults^verything they say an devervthmg thev do .

There wasTli^ LiddiLioiial-piettrre^of the hysterical angry

female: "A froward woman in her frantic mood will pull,
haul, swerve, scratch, and tear all that stands in her way."
There were the exaggerated comparisons: "The lion being
bitten with hunger, the Bear being robbed of her young
ones, the Viper being trod on, all these are nothing so
terrible as the fury of a woman."
Of course ever>' war has two sides, and this pamphlet
war was no exception. Women volleyed back with pam-
phlets wondering about men who didn't have anything
better to do than "write some bitter satire, pamphlet, or
rhyme against women." They also took a few shots at the
double standard that irwlnlgfr^ ^^rnmlr^n mpn as hryy.t^ jiiQt
ha ving ^ ^nr^r\ timp U^\ ji] H gpH dninlcpfi wo men tO be of
loose morals. T he double standard was everywhere: "If a
man abuse a maid and get her with child, no matter is
made of it but as a trick of youth, but it is made so heinous
an offense in the maid that she is disparaged and utterb
undone by it."
Furthermore, these pamphlets argued, if women were
bad, they had men to thank for it. If wives were deceptive,
it was because they learned how to lie to protect their

husband's reputation; if they were vain, it was because

men flattered them. In Othello, Emilia even goes so far as
to blame men for women's adulterous actions, telling Des-
demona that it's men's fault for setting a bad example:
"But I do think it is their husbands' faults If wives do fall
. have not we affections. Desires for sport, and frailty,
. .

as men have? Then let them use us well; else let them
know. The ills we do, their ills instruct us so."
 !

78 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

Whether women were being attacked or defended, one

—
thing was clear as ever, they were a hot topic of the
times. But in the end, the word battles didn't accomplish
much besides generating a lot of paper. The intellectual
debate about the nature and position of women did little
to improve tneir situation. As long as the law denied women
equality, as long as the fruits of education remained be-
yond the reach of most, as long as church teachings, bi-
ological theories, and long-practiced social conventions
I upheld women's inferiority, Elizabethan women had no
choice but to accept the fact that they lived in a man's

u world.

Meanwhile,
Back on the Throne. .

While stalwart Elizabethan women were battling it out

on the front lines of the household, Queen Elizabeth was
proving that a woman was more than capable of mastering
—
a kingdom and showing herself to be an almighty ex-
ception to the rules that governed women's lives.
—
In the first place, she never got married despite the
universal expectation that women must. For a time after
she came to the throne, everyone had simply assumed that
she'd be getting married, just as her older sister. Queen
Mary, had before her; and there was a great deal of talk
about who the lucky man would be. After all, who else
but a husband could relieve her of the labors which are
better borne by men, as King Philip of Spain suggested.
—
Members of Parliament concerned about who her
—
successor would be tried over and over again to make
their wayward queen see the necessity and urgency of
marriage. At one point they even threatened to hold back
money she desperately needed for the government until
she promised to get married. Elizabeth dug in her heels
and refused to be blackmailed, declaring instead that she
would pray to God "to continue me in this mind to live
out of the state of marriage."
In fact, bein g a single woman _§frvprl th<^ qneen^well in—
 —
LIKE A VIRGIN: QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN 79

matters o f f^^T-^^prp pnliry She wasn't above making and

breaking diplomatic alliances by dangling the prospect of
marriage in the faces of various Spanish, French, and
Scandinavian nobles and princes. She would call off the
match at the last moment, either because the would-
be husband-king was Catholic and therefore unaccepta-
ble, or because he refused to come to England and submit
himself to a degrading onceover by the queen. If foreigners
were unsuitable, an English husband was even more out
of the question; to make a king out of a subject, even if
he was a nobleman, would be seen as dangerously desta-
bilizing to the countr\'.
Perhaps what it really came down to was that Elizabeth
realized early on that marriage meant loss of powen^ he_
couldn't bea qiiegn^and-ar-wi ^
at th£-^ametime^Some^
"otestanTwriters thought she could have TTBothways
"Why may not the woman be the husband's inferior in
matters of wedlock, and his head in the guiding of the
commonwealth?"
But Elizabeth knew better, and once the scepter was
in her hand, she was determined not to give it up to any-
one. "In the end/ she declared with satisfaction, knowing
'

that she had won her case, "this shall be for me sufficient ,

jLhat a marble stone shall rTp(;-iarp th^t ^ n ueen havTng_

reigned snrh a tiTpp, H^/^H anH rWf-r] a(Wgin\"

This careful, calculating queen had learned about power

and prudence early in life. The storms and tumults she
survived as a child taught her a lot about self-preservation.
After Elizabeth's mother Anne Boleyn was beheaded by
her father King Heniy VIII, the young princess was de-
clared illegitimate by an act of Parliament. She then had
to get used to four different stepmothers in a row, as Henry
went through one wife after another in his quest for a
male heir. Her last stepmother remamed after King Henry
died, taking Elizabeth to live with her and her new
—
husband a situation that taught the princess yet another
political lesson. Before long, nasty rumors began to cir-
culate about scandalous goings-on between Elizabeth and
her new stepfather, who, it was said, visited her bedroom
—
every morning often before she was fully dressed. Even
in a time before inquisitive newspaper reporters were
sniffing out improper behavior in political figures, the
 ! —
80 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

future queen learned how easily public scandal could erupt

as a result of private actions.
The oppressive five-year reign of Elizabeth's Catholic
half sister Mar\' made life for the princess even more dif-
ficult. Although bom a Protestant, she was forced (along
with the rest of the nation) to convert to Catholicism
which she did, at least outwardly. But Mar\' was still very
suspicious of her sister, especially because Elizabeth was
—
so immensely popular with the English people who knew
that she was the rising star. At one dreadful point, she
was even accused of treason and sent to the damp, gloomy
—
Tower of London protesting her innocence all the way.
In order to survive all these perils Elizabeth had had
to cultivate wariness, watchfulness, calculation, and pa-
tience. She became a born actress endlessly resourceful
,

at playing whatever role circumstances required. This ability

proved to be no less useful when she came to the throne.
Certainly Elizabeth began grandly. The new queen's
coronation procession through London was an extrava-
ganza. Even in the middle of the cold winter, exuberant
subjects lined up behind the wooden rails on the frozen
narrow streets for miles to see the glittering procession:
fathers lifted up babies; women held out little nosegays;
and everv'one cheered and waved as their beloved Eliza-
beth passed by, resplendent in her golden glitter on the
way to Westminster. But the reception the new queen
received in international political circles was far more
reserved. At first, of course, rulers and governments were
holding their breath to see who Elizabeth would marry;
when that issue remained unresolved, foreign leaders grew
hostile to the very idea of a woman ruler.
The general opinion at the time was that ^governing
was an art acc essible onl y to men; a female head of sTale"
'u^as an otfense agamsi nature, une rrotestant writer pub-
lished a book called The First Blast of the Trumpet Against
the Monstrous Regiment of Women, in which he declared
that "it is more than a monster in nature that a woman
should reign and bear empire above men." This criticism
was actually aimed at Elizabeth's predecessor, the Cath-
olic Mary — but unfortunately for the author, the book
came out just as the Protestant Elizabeth ascended the
throne. Needless to say, there were no more blasts from
that particular trumpet.
 LIKE A \'IRGIN: queen ELIZABETH AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN 8 1

This writer wasn't alone in his sentiments, however;

even Ehzabeth's closest ad\isors were convinced that she
suffered from womanly weakness of the mind. Two vears
into her reign, one of her ministers scolded a diplomat
for mentioning to the queen "a matter of such weight,
'being too much for a woman's knowledge." This didn't
stop her from establishing herself; the Pope later ex-
pressed surprise at Elizabeth's formidable authority: "She
is only a woman and yet she makes herself feared by
. . .

Spain, by France ... by all."

A Feminine Mystique

Elizabeth didn't waste much time wonting about what

would be called feminist principles and sexist
in later ages
attitudes. Her concerns were practical and immediate: how
to get on with the business of ruling. Her Court was a ^

large and unruly community whn «^p mpmbp rs mostly male

^
were constantly competinp with each n thpr fr>r ff^y-^r, pn!^•pT:.
and position. Tt was a chaotic, corrupt place, as hectic as
'the stock exchange, filled with ambitious young men who
had come from all over to rub elbows with the great and
mighty. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus is sent
to the Court to "practice tilts and tournaments, Hear sweet
discourse, converse with noblemen. And be in eye of every
exercise Worthy his youth and nobleness of birth."
The main task Elizabeth faced, even after replacing
some of the gentlemen attendants with her own ladies-
in-waiting, was figuring out how to maintain control of
this male presene and yet retain her courtiers' loyalty at
the same time.
the Court presented a challenge, it also provided a
If
perfect setting. For the Court was the center of the nation's
political, cultural, and social life. All the ins and outs of
governing wound their way around the Court; many of
the interesting new trends in poetrv', drama, and literature
flourished there. It was the place for all the fun that high
society knew how to have —
tournaments, balls, witty con-
versations, lavish parties. With its rich velvets and shim-
mering silks, its sparkling conversation, its self-assured
 !

82 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

air, the glittering spectacle of the Court was the ideal back-
drop for Elizabeth's command performance. To overcome
the disadvantages of being a woman ruler in the over-
whelmingly male world of the Court, she had to pla y a
double role, alternating between the earthly woman^an^
t he divine majesty .

Her strategy worked superbly, for if her gender was

the problem, it was also the solution. Elizabeth gained
control of the Court by capitalizing on the fact that she
—
was a woman initially a young and attractive one. She
shamelessly flirted with her courtiers and mercilessly toyed
with their emotions. She played rival factions off against
each other rather than letting them destroy her. ^he gave
out her favor and snatched it hack without warnin g, so
fhat no courtier could ever be sure of his standing with
her. She was as imperious and moody as Shakespeare's
Cleopatra, changing her mind and temper as rapidly as
the English clouds covered and uncovered the sun.
Careful as always, Elizabeth never let the game of flir-
tation get out of hand. She never allowed a courtier to
become her one and only but let several dangle at once.
And whenever a courtier went too far, thinking that he
could expect her favors, she quickly cut him down to size
with her acerbic wit and sharp one-liners. When an angry
courtier dared reproach her for refusing to give him money,
she replied that anger made dull men witty but kept them
pooTj^

Although Elizabeth won the Court over with her "fem-

inine wiles" and flirtatiousness, she also rose far above or-
dinary definitions of the feminine. As a divinely ordained
ruler, she became the personification of virtue —
Moiksty.
Prudence.IVvisdom. by virtue of her unmamed statc/The
irgm Queen was also the symbol of that supreme fe-
—
male virtue Chastity. A cult grew up around this queen
—
who was so rnuch more' than a queen a cult that she her-
self encouraged. She was acclaimed in poetrv, song, bal-
lad, and pamphlet as Astraca, Diana (the mythological
Roman moon goddess), and the pure chaste shepherdess-
nymph of many a pastoral poem. The courtier poet Ed-
mund Spenser celebrated her as Gloriana, the Fairy Queen,
whose knights rode out to do battle and deeds of honor
in her name. Like Shakespeare's Coriolanus, she was hailed
 LIKE A VIRGIN: OL EEN ELIZABETH AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN 83

as "a thing Made by some other deity than Nature, That

shapes man better;" a Swiss tourist remarked with interest
that the EngHsh worshipped her "not only as their queen
but as their god."
No matter if in later years her teeth were black, her
white skin shriveled with age, her head weighed down with
a huge red wig, her temperament grouchier and more
difficult by the day. Elizabeth the woman, subject to the
physical weaknesses that affect all human beings and the
added "natural frailties" that afflicted all women, was con-
veniently lost beneath the pomp and paraphernalia of Eliz-
abeth the symbol.
Much of the lavish praise that gushed over the queen
in her lifetime exalted her "mp^synline" vir|np<; of rnnrp|gp
and intpllppt At times Elizabeth almost had to become a
man in order to get anything done, just as many of Shake-
speare's heroines —
Viola in Twelfth Night, Portia in The
Merchant of Venice, Julia in 77?^ Two Gentlemen of Verona,
—
and Rosalind in As You Like It had to put on male clothes
and boyish behavior in order to enjoy male privileges of
freedom and self-determination. Rosalind certainly un-
—
derstands how the game is played "in my heart Lie there
—
what hidden woman's fear there will We'll have a swash-
ing [swaggering] and a martial outside."
Elizabeth knew as well as Rosalind tha t she simply had
Jo maintain that swashing ^^H m;:|rtia| o^
side^ and she"
didn't let down her guard for a minute. Jo call a ttent ion
to \vQiQanlines^Jji J:he w jjOftg^vay wQiii3jiavgIIBe^ to
comrmTpoMcar^uicidpr^ the rare occasion when ETTz-
^brtifTeferlrd'tohergender at all, she drew attention to
it as a shortcoming
—
"my sexly weakness." By emphasiz-
ing the weakness of womanhood, Elizabeth was cleverly
drawing attention to herself as the j^vgrwhelming; excep-
Jiun-Jn her speech to the English troops at lilbur\- just
before the invasion of the Spanish Armada, she said she le
hoped no one would hold her sex against her: "I know
I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I hav

the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of E

gland, too."
w
Elizabeth as too well -versed in the w av of the males
w^orld to think she could get"^waV wilh PulTTng^anv other
w^omen m —
positions of power even f ^^^ had wanted to.
j

Not only were all her councillors male, but apparently she
84 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

forbade her ladies-in-waiting to mention affairs of state

at all!
Like her woman subjects, Elizabeth dwelled in a male
world, facing the same jraditional barriers of inferiority
that Elizabethan women faced, but crossmg others, suCh
'

as education, with upper-class ease. But even though she

showed herself to be a powerful, popular, and wise rul-
er. she couldn't make a difff renre ir| the lives of her female
snhjert s beran s p «jhp t;»rrooHpH nnLy_hy repudiating her
,

ghe was the exceptiQa-.ainong f&males. In the end, this

grSat queen succeeded inthe Elizabethan world not be-
cause she was a woman but in spite of it.
 CHAPTER 6

The Ties That

Bind: Family Life

If you woke up one morning and suddenly found yourself

in a sixteenth-centur\' family,you might be surprised at
how familiar everything seemed. Although you would be
getting off of a lumpy straw mattress and planting your
feet on a floor covered with rushes instead of rugs, when
you went downstairs you would find a ver\' modem-
—
looking nuclear family mother, father, and a few sisters
—
and brothers sitting on stools around the breakfast table,
drinking their morning beer {that might be different!) and
eating their bread and butter before getting on with the
day's work.
A few generations earlier, however, it would have been
quite a different story. In the Middle Ages the "family"
was a much bigger crowd, essentially a clan whose loy-
alties extended even to distant relatives; "kinship" was an
all-purpose word.
But by the sixteenth century "kin" had become a much
—
more exclusive club parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts,
and uncles. Everyone else was left out in the cold as a
distant relative, vaguely hailed as "cousin" or just "friend."
This newly-defined family plaved a leadings role on th e
broader sta^e of society, su pplying i ts economic, repro-
ductive, social, and emationcil recommended daily re^-
quirements .

"
The family was the firmest and most entrenched foun-
dation of Elizabethan society; it didn't occur to many peo-
 ! —
86 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

pie that there was Hfe outside it. Indeed, EHzabethan life
—
sometimes seemed to be one long dance be it a courtier's
—
minuet or a villager's folk dance from one family to the
next: from the original family Elizabethans grew up in to
the "surrogate" family they were sent to as servants, col-
lege students, or apprentices, to the families they would
one day create with their spouses. At any stage of life, the
—
family was more or less a given an immensely comfort-
ing fact. Bewildered and buffeted by fast-paced changes
in society, Elizabethans needed something to lean on
and most found it within the family.
They akop^rjieH th^j r living in a familvs etting. whether
in a stately manor in the rolling green daieS^ northern
England or in a cramped and tiny cloth shop on one of
the filthy and noisy streets of London. And of course the
family literally kept society alive by providing it with chil-
dren. Procreation was one of the principal and sacred
purposes of marriage. At the end of As You Like It, the
god of marriage is applauded for maintaining the popu-
lation: " 'Tis Hymen peoples every town; High wedlock
then be honored."

Death Comes A'knocking

But if Hymen peopled every town. Death unpeopled it

almost as quickly. For death was the center of Elizabethan
life —the other member of the nuclear family that no one
liked to think about but everyone sensed lurking in cor-
ners.
— —
Death not divorce was the great Elizabethan ho me-
.breaker Its preterred victims were mfants and children;
.

^^^hies>were lucky to survive the perils of birth, much less

their first year of life when they were most vulnerable to
infectious diseases (the plague or smallpox), malnutrition,
and a host of other terrors. Some infants were accidentally
suffocated when mothers lay too close to them in bed;
others succumbed to birth defects.
The child's environment was no more friendly; it was
—
with natural and artificial hazards stairs to fall down,
filled
open fireplaces to walk into, horse's hooves to be trampled
 —
THE TIES THAT BIND: FAMILY LIFE 87

beneath, village wells to topple into, and ditches to drown

in. No wonder one out of every five Elizabethan children
didn't live beyorTd the age oi: ten. ^Shakespeare's son Hanv"
net died aher his eleventh birthday, and too many Eliz-
abethan parents could identih' with Capulet when he tells
Paris that Juliet is his only suniving child: "earth has
swallowed all my hopes but she." Viola's confession to
Orsino in Twelfth Night, although a fib, certainly has the
ring of truth: "I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers too."
Death left its calling card with adults, too; most Eliz -
abethans had lost at least one parent hv their twenty-hhtT-
Hirthdav Helena, the voung heroine of A//'5 Well TJiat Ends
.

Well, mourns her dead father — or so the Countess thinks

when she obsenes, "The remembrance of her father never
approaches her heart but the tyranny of her sorrows takes
all livelihood from her cheek." Ironically, women often
^ied in the process of privinp life for in the hands ofun^
,

trained midwives without any surgical know-how or anes-

thesia _childbirth was not only "natural" but downright
primitive —
and "extremely dangerous. As for men, many
fell on the battlefields of England's constant foreign^>iiia£s
in Europe. Also^ famine poverty, the bubonic plapue7an3^
,

other diseases cTaJrpp^ liv"^ naiiy

In the Nurse's Arms

Despite the manifold dangers of pregnancy and child-

birth, parents welcomed a child as a blessing from God.
As the Clown in All's Well That Ends Well exclaims, "I think
I shall never have the blessing of God till I have issue o'

my body; for they say bairns [children] are blessings."

With the fear of death uppermost in their minds, parents
took care to baptize this new blessing right away, so that
the baby's soul would be saved if death staked its claim
in the first few months of life. Once that was taken care
of, the baby was greatly fussed over in its early years
rocked, sung to, and kept out of the light to protect its
tender eyes. Its tiny arms and legs were wrapped with
strips of "swaddling cloth" for protection; Hamlet conjures
 !

88 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

up a ridiculous image of the pompous elderly statesman

Polonius when he tells the Players, "That great baby you
see there is not yet out of his swaddling clouts."
The mother usually took care of breast-feeding her in-
fant. But many upper-class women, worried that breast-
feeding would spoil their figures or their social lives, shipped
their babies off to a wet nurse, paying her to do it. Not
only was this costly, it was risky: because there weren't
any surrogate wet nurse agencies, a mother couldn't al-
ways be sure what kind of situation she was sending her
infant into. One upper-class woman worried about a po-
tential wet nurse: "She looks like a slattern but she sayeth
that if she takes the child she will have a mighty care of
it, and truly she hath two as fine children of her own as

ever I saw." Many nurses were overworked or indif-

ferent —
burdened with too many children or not enough
—
food and were the cause of more than one baby's death.
Indeed, Juliet's faithful and affectionate Nurse is unusual
in her maternal devotion to her charge: "Thou wast the
prettiest babe that e'er I nursed," she tells Juliet, "An I
might live to see thee married once, I have my wish."

A Firm but Loving Hand

The fact that death might swoop down any day didn't
cause a lack of parental affection. In the sixteenth century,
unlike preceding ages, p arents were just beginning to bring
up their children with tender loving care, worrying about
each scratch, sore, or^ fev^r-^knowlng that it might be
fatal —
and providing the best food, clothing, and shelter
they could.
For poor families, raising children often meant a ter-
rificstruggle against the enemies of inadequate food,
nonexistent heating, dangerously overcrowded one-room
cottages, and pitifully thin clothes. Farm laborers in one
part of the countryside were "so extreme poor that they
are scarcely able to put bread in their children's bellies."
But parents often went to extraordinary, even heartbreak-
ing lengths to get food for their children, spinning wool
The aged servant Adam was luckier than many homeless old
people who wandered the countryside in lonely poverty,
for he had his young master Orlando to keep him company.
(Lou Gilbert as Adam in A5 You Like It in 1973.)
photo: GEORGE E. JOSEPH

All photographs from New York Shakespeare Festival

Productions, Joseph Papp, Producer.
 ^ m^

The alehouse was the place for ordinary Elizabethans to ha\e

a beer, take a date, find a job or just hang out, as Falstaff and his
cronies know. (Stacy Keach, second from right, as Falstaff in
The First Part of King Henry IV in 1968.) photo: george e. Joseph

Sir Hugh Evans tests his pupil William on his knowledge of

Latin grammar, a subject every Elizabethan schoolboy studied.
(Left to right: George Pentecost, Marilyn Sokol, Marcia Rodd
and Stephen Austin in The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1974.)
photo: GEORGE E. JOSEPH
 Valentine, (left) a gentleman of Verona, hopes to distinguish
himself as a worthy courtier and Renaissance man. (A scene
from Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1987.) photo: martha swope

This "deposition" scene, where the divinely ordained monarch

Richard II (left) is deprived of his rightful crown, was
considered too subversive to be allowed onstage in
Shakespeare's day. (Peter Macnicol, left, as Richard and John
Bedford Lloyd as Bolingbroke in King Richard II in 1987.)
photo: MARTHA SWOPE
 The charming wood creatures and fairies ot .4 Midsummer
Night's Dream— a far cry from the traditional EHzabethan
conceptionof fairies— gather in the wood. (WiUiam Hurt, third
from left, as Oberon and Michele Shay, second from right, as
Titania with the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1982.)
photo: MARTHA SWOPE
These witches are sinister stage versions ot the real-Ufe old hags
many EHzabethans suspected of practicing uitchcraft. (Joan
DeWeese, Barbara Lester and Nancy Watts in Macbeth in 1962.)
photo: GEORGE E. JOSEPH
 Shakespeare's portrayal of the pompous Don Armado, a
refined traveller of Spain," is far less derogatory than the anti-
Spanish pamphlets circulating around London at that time.
(Paul Stexens in Love's Labor' s Lost in 1965.)
photo: GEORGE E. JOSEPH
Though Shylock is a Jew of Venice, he had a few courucrparis in

Shakespeare's London, where there was a small community

of Jews. (George C. Scott as Shylock in The Merchant of \'e}uce
in 1962.) photo: george e. Joseph
 The exotic, dark-skinned Prince of Morocco wooing Portia
chooses the wrong casket, much to her relief: "Let all ot
his complexion choose me so." Such prejudice was rampant in
Shakespeare's England. (James Earl Jones, center, in
The Menhu}}! ofVeiiice in 1962.) photo: george e. Joseph
 The marriage of the Moor Othello and the white Venetian
Desdemona violates the Elizabethan principle that like should
marry like. (Julienne Marie and James Earl Jones in Othello
in 1964.) photo: george e. Joseph
 ]

1--^
R
1}
'
.
r

v%
^^

r\

->
,«*-.

1 The aspiring Lucentio, taking advantage ot the upper-class

practice of educating girls at home, disguises himself as a tutor
in order to woo Bianca. (Deborah Rush and James Lally as
Bianca and Lucentio in The Taniiiig uf the Shrew in 1978.)
photo: GEORGE E. JOSEPH
 Blonde, soft-skinned, and rosy-cheeked, Katharina fits the
EHzabethan standards of feminine beauty perfectly.
(Mer\l Streepas Kaihar'ma in The Taming of the Shrew in 1978.)
photo: GEORGE E. JOSEPH
 Many Elizabethans fought— and many died— on foreign
battlefields similar to this one at Agincourt, where Henry V
leads his troops to glorious victory. (Kevin Kline, center, as
Henry in King Henry V in 1984.) photo: martha swope

The gravediggers are a reminder of the constant presence of

death in Elizabethan life. (Peter Van Norden and William Duell
as the gravedisaers in Hamlet in 1986.) photo: martha swope
 The pregnant Julietta is an unfortunate victim of the
Ehzabethan betrothal system, which considered the mere
promise of marriage as vaHd as an actual marriage ceremony.
(Amv Taubin as^Julietta in Measure For Measure in 1966.)
photo: GEORGE E. JOSEPH
 Coriolanus, a grown man and a national hero, still shows
respect for his mother by kneeling in her presence. (Morgan
Freeman as Coriolanus and Gloria Foster as Volumnia in
Curiulauiis in 1979.) photo: george e. Joseph
 Hamlet, in a private talk with his mother, accuses her ot
being seductive and lustful — a common Elizabethan stereotype
of women's behavior. (Stacy Keach and Colleen Dewhurst as
Hamlet and Gertrude in Hamler in 1972.)
photo: GEORGE E. JOSEPH
-F
If

The authorities of the city of London hved in fear that stage

plays would lead to a riotous gathering like Jack Cade's
rebellion that Shakespeare portrays in The Wars of the Roses.
(A scene from The Second Part of King Henry VI in 1970.)
photo: GEORGE E. JOSEPH
 THE TIES THAT BIND: FAMILY LIFE 89

through the night or walking all over the countryside to

get even the most basic provisions for their brood.
Since there weren't many professionally-written child-
rearing manuals, most parents followed the example of
their parents. The mother's love was generally considered
stronger; as one upper-class woman wrote to her son,
"There is no love so forcible as the love of an affectionate
mother to her natural child."
But a right upbringing involved more than "forcible"
love, in most people's eyes; it also required forcible disj
( Although discipline was always strict, whipping
^iplir|e .

was usually a last resort. Some of the few child-rearing

books in circulation advocated regular flogging; others
(written by women) recommended a lighter touch: "for
what disposition so ever they be of, gentleness will soonest
bring them to virtue."
The main thing parents asked in return for all the time
and energ>' they spent w^as ijbedience^and perhaps a little
gratitude (parents were, after all, human). Elizabethan
children were expected t o. honor their pare nts bv obpyitxpr
.them in all matters; c hildren didn't speak without first
—
being spoken to nor was talking back to parents a fre-
quent occurrence. Middle- and upper-class children were
used to kneeling everv' day to ask their parents' blessing.
Shakespeare's valiant Roman general Coriolanus honors
his mother this way even after he is a grown man and a
famous warrior: "You gods!" he checks himself, "I prate,
And the most noble mother of the world Leave unsaluted.
Sink, my knees, i' th' earth; Of thy deep duty more impresT
sion show than That of common sons." His mother replies,
"O, stand up blest!" Most children's greeting to their par-
ents was less dramatic than this, of course
—
"good morn-
ing, father and mother; please, may I have your blessing?"
In poor famil ies, however, children had to do more
than just honor and obe v; they were also expected tojahor
and gam A tamilv that was just scraping by often counted
.

on even its young children for income. Simple chores such

as gathering wood, scaring birds away, picking up stones,
tending the sheep, or keeping an eye on the newest baby
were the normal responsibilities of children in less well-
off families.
Few parents, rich or poor, viewed their children as
 !

90 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

"social security"; elderly parents rarely expected to be taken

in and taken care of by their offspring. In the first place,
given that the average life expectancy for Elizabethans was
somewhere around forty years, not many parents ever
qualified for such social security. Many of those who did
would probably have to work right up until the day they
died anyway, unable to afford retirement.
In any case, the older generation generally thought it
stupid or ill-advised to go live with grown children as
"sojourners." How could parents give up everything and
still expect to retain their children's respect and obedience?

King Lear discovers the sad truth of this conventional

wisdom too late, of course; after dividing up his kingdom
between two of his three daughters, he is relieved or —
—
deprived of one privilege after another until he cries out
in futile rage, "Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend. More
hideous when thou show'st thee in a child Than the sea
monster!"

Halfway House

With the major exception of children of poor laborers,

Elizabethan teenagers generally left home to go live with
another family. Sendinp children awav to spe nd their ad-
ol e^rence with other people was an almost universal cu.s-
tom for the middle and upper classes. An d so Panthino
finds it odd that Antonio keeps his son Froteus at home
in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, "while other men, of
slender reputation. Put forth their sons to seek preferment
out: Some to the wars, to try their fortune there. Some to
discover islands far away, Some to the studious univer-
sities."
Although sending their teenagers away might have saved
beleaguered Elizabethan parents many headaches, they
didn't stop worrying about them. Launce's departure from
his family practically undoes them, if we can believe his
description: "My mother weeping, my father wailing, my
sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands,
and all our house in a great perplexity." Even the young
fellow safelv ensconced within the protective high walls
 1

THE TIES THAT BIND: FAMILY LIFE 9

of Oxford or Cambridge, looked after by a tutor deter-

mined to keep him on the straight and narrow, could reg-
ularly expect long letters from his parents asking how his
grades were and whether he was getting enough to eat.
Not only does Hamlet's Polonius give his son Laertes a
stem lecture before he goes back to the university at Paris
("these few precepts in thy memoiy Look thou character")
but he then dispatches Reynaldo (in secret) to "make in-
quire Of his beha\ior" — that is, to make sure Laertes is
behaving himself.
The wealthiest families usually sent their adolescents
either to university or to the Inns of Court. But most teen-
agers went to work as mansenants to wealthy farmers or
maidsenants to upper-class women; others were appren-
ticed to craftsmen and tradesmen in the cities. Indeed,
thousands of ambitious adolescents from all over England
made their way to London to work as apprentices to gro-
cers, candlemakers, spice merchants, barbers, and cob-
blers, who were often acquaintances of the family.
The master usually took on the role of the boy's sur-
—
rogate father on a contractual basis, of course. He would
agree to feed, clothe, and shelter his new charge, as well
as to teach him the trade; in turn, the boy signed the usual
—
seven-year contract, promising no doubt with fingers
—
crossed not to run away, not to fool around with girls,
and not to get married. Cockfights, bowling grounds, and
tennis courts were off-limits, and hair had to be kept short.
Girl sen^ants were governed by a similar set of rules ap-
plying to them.
And so the apprentice began his life in a brand new^
family. It wasn't so different from the old days with his
real parents, except that his master didn't always feel ob-
ligated to provide the same kind of concern. Horror stories
about cruel masters were a dime a dozen: one girl ser\'ant
was stripped, hung by her thumbs, and given twenty-one
lashes with a whip; a male apprentice was hit with an axe.
One hapless fellow barricaded himself in an alehouse rather
than return to the master he loathed.
Male apprentices were one of the most distinct and
noticeable groups in the city. With the "fur\- of ungovemed
youth" (as Shakespeare called it) racing in their blood,
they roamed the streets of London in a rowdy, rambunc-
tious fraternity — much like the crowd of loyal prentices
92 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

in Henry VI Part 2, who arrive en masse to cheer on their

fellow Peter in single combat against his master "Be
—
merry, Peter, and fear not thy master. Fight for credit of
the prentices," they advise him. Whether they were drink-
ing each other's health in their favorite alehouse, jostling
each other in the pit of the Globe Theatre as they stood
and watched one of Shakespeare's plays, or competing
with each other to chat up pretty servant girls.^apprentices
did their best \n stir iip tf^''^^^ No doubt most people
who encountered them went away muttering something
similar to the shepherd in The Winter's Tale, who wishes
that "there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty,
or that youth would sleep out the rest, for there is nothing
in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging
."
the ancientry [the elderly], stealing, fighting.. .

—
Apprenticeship or servitude, or wage labor, or uni-
versity— was where Elizabethan teenagers spent those
strange years sandwiched between childhood and adult-
hood. They were in the awkward position of being old
enough to leave their parents' homes but not old enough
to set up their own households, and so society provided
a kind of halfway house where they were supen'ised by
people who weren't their parents but w-ere supposed to be
like their parents. However parentlike they might have
been, these caretakers actually gave teenagers a lot of lee-
way.

Out From Under

Although it would be a while before Elizabethan teen-

agers would actually tie the knot in marriage, they weren't
averse to casting out a few lines here and there. For at
their age, as one writer said, "Cupid and Venus [the gods
of love] were and would be very busy to trouble the quiet
minds of young folk." Teenagers might have several liai-
sons before settling down for a long-term one, and, of
course, the fact that they were away from home gave them
the freedom to experiment.
The opportunities for socializing must have seemed
endless, particularly for enterprising young teenagers. They
 THE TIES THAT BIND: FAMILY LIFE 93

might dance cheek to cheek at a village celebration, trade

sweet nothings in the dark back booth of an alehouse, take
in the sights and stalls at countn- fairs and markets, stroll
along back lanes, or do goodness-knows-what behind the
back stairs of the master's house. Perdita and Florizel
declared their love at a village sheep-shearing festival in
The Winter's Tale. Of course, a girl had to be careful if —
she walked out with more than one man within a short
period of time, she might find herself the target of im-
pleasant gossip. But on the whole these young folk were
left to their own devices, unchaperoned and unhindered.
Even children of upper-class families who didn't enjoy
the freedom from parents' watchful gazes could find some
ways to spend time alone with one another although —
daughters were more sheltered. They might go sight-seeing
around the countryside in a coach, dance close together
at balls, or talk to each other at la\ish upper-class parties
during the London season. Flattering letters declaring un-
dying love were another good gambit; in TJie Two Gentle-
men of Verona, Proteus glibly advises Thurio on the art of
letter-writing: "Say that upon the altar of her beauty You
sacrifice your tears, your sighs, your heart." And upper-
class swains often sent trinkets and gifts as tokens of their
affection; Proteus' plan to win Silvia by presenting her
with his pedigree lapdog backfires when his servant Launce
substitutes his own mang>- cur instead.

The Party's Over

Things changed, however, as teenagers approached mar-

rving age; freedoms were curbed. Upper-class children in
particular found their parents suddenly taking a lot more
interest in their romantic affairs. Even though it was no
longer fashionable for parents to arrange and force a mar-
riage against a child's will, as Juliet's father tries to do,
the child still wasn't entirely in control of his or her marital
fate.
As parents explained over and o\'er, th ejroperty gains
^nd fam ily alliance s that a good mam ^f r-r^nlH h>x-\r^^ vu^^^&a,

Jju^too impOrtantToljeJgl^ in \\xf^J{^r^iiu^rh\\c\rpr\ The

 ! —
94 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

Margaret Dakins story showed the lengths parents could

go to in their quest for a good match: because she was
the only child of a wealthy couple, the future status of the
family depended on her marriage, and her parents looked
long and hard to find just the right combination of prop-
erty and prestige. But evidently they were better judges of
wealth than health, for both of her first two husbands died
within a few years of marriage, and by the age of twenty-
five, she was on her third husband!
For many a matchmaking parent, wealth and property
were the only considerations. Valentine, one of the two
gentlemen of Verona, disparages Thurio as "My foolish
rival, that her [Silvia's] father likes Only for his posses-
sions are so huge." And in The Merry Wives of Windsor,
Sir Hugh Evans observes, with his inimitable Welsh flair,
that Anne Page is well endowed where it counts: "Seven
hundred pounds and possibilities," he says, "is goot gifts."
Anne herself rejects these criteria for choosing a mate
"O, what a world of vile ill-favored faults Looks handsome
in three hundred pounds a year!" she says of her suitor.
Slender.
Equalitv of status, reli pinn and a^^ wprp JTTipf>rtant
too. Couples ot different ages, races, religions, or social
standing were certainly not encouraged, and even highly
disapproved of in some quarters. Desdemona's marriage
to the Moor Othello shocks and angers her father. Polo-
nius, as he tells Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet, has
warned Ophelia that "Lord Hamlet is a prince out of thy
star; This must not be." And in The Winter's Tale, King
Polixenes is outraged that his princely son consorts with
a lowly shepherdess: "Thou art too base To be acknowl-
edged. Thou a scepter's heir. That thus affects a sheep-
hook!"
If parents presented a child — a daughter— with a match
that mettheir criteria, one nf t\v/r> thir^ gs (;-niilrl happe n
She could resign herself to the inevitable (as MargareT^
Dakins did) and _gQ through with it; or she could put up
afight-jat the risk ot incurring her parents' anger. Juliet's
Sther cannot believe his ears when she refuses his gen-
erous offer of the Count Paris; after all he's done for her,
"to have a wretched puling fool, A whining mammet, in
her fortune's tender, To answer, T'll not wed, I cannot love,
I am too young; I pray you, pardon me'." But if a rebellious
 —
THE TIES THAT BIND: FAMILY LIFE 95

daughter or son resisted a match with enough energy

Anne Page, in 77?^ Merry Wives of Windsor, vows that she
would "rather be set quick [ahve] th' earth And bowled
i'

to death with turnips" than marr>' Doctor Caius —

the mar-
riage might be called off.
Upper-class parents didn't always tr\' to choose for their
offspring; often children were free to select their own
spouses. Whoever made the choice, the important thing
was to get the consent of everyone involved. Tranio rec-
ognizes that winning Bianca's heart is only the first step
for Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew: "But, sir, love
concerneth us to add Her father's liking." Ferdinand (TJie
Tempest) apologizes to his father for wooing Miranda
without consulting him: "I chose her when I could not ask
my father For his advice." Master Page refuses to allow
Anne to many until he bestows his appro\'al in The Merry
Wives of Windsor: "The wealth I have waits on my consent,
and my consent goes not that way," he says of her beloved
Fenton.
—
But in the end like many a hapless Elizabethan
—
parent Mr. Page accepts his daughter's choice: "Fenton,
heaven give thee joy! What cannot be eschewed must be
embraced." Another upper-class woman writes despair-
ingly to her husband about their wilful daughter: "She is
so great with Mr. Candish's son that she is fully minded
to have him .Whether you like it or not it must go
. .

forwards and be a match."

Things xx/f^rp mnrh 1p<;^ diffirnlt and rnnstrajned on the_

lower ru ng^ '^^ ^^^ <;r>rial IpiHHer. Lcss wcll-to-do young
people were not only freer to shop around, but also to
rnarr\- w^h ^niP^^vr thi^y "f^ritprl <^innf^ grand property deals
"andshrewd marital investments weren't being made, pa-
rental consent wasn't usually a problem.
But this didn't mean that money didn't matter. Al-
though a servant or apprentice might have had fewer pos-
sessions, he still had economic interests to think about.
Sunival in the rough ^waters of the Elizal>ethan economy
was impossible without a good helpmate through life, and
it w
as crucial to look before leaping. A potential diver into
the <piarriage market^^ould probably give a lot of thought
to hoi ^ood a provider or housekeeper a prospec tive part-
iae£.^as likely to be. In The Two Gentlemen oj Ve}unti,
 ! —
96 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

Launce lists the virtues of the milkmaid he plans to marry:

"Here is the catalog of her condition," he pronounces: she
can fetch and carry, milk, brew good ale, sew, knit, wash,
scour, and spin. In fact, this woman was a real find, for
such skills were crucial to running an efficient and thrifty
household, and not everyone had them in equal measure;
as Rosalind reminds the haughty Phebe in As You Like It,
"Sell when you can, you are not for all markets."
Marriage wasn't always a cut-and-dried financial trans-
action; the Duke of Suffolk, encouraging King Henry- VI
to marr\' for love instead of politics in Shakespeare's play,
insists that "Marriage is a matter of more worth Than to
be dealt in by attorneyship." Among the poorer classes
especially, love mattered. Many was the young man who
swore passionately that he could not survive without the
lifelong presence of his beloved, and many the young
woman who vowed to love her chosen one till not a breath
was left in her belly.

Tying the Knot

These were the sorts of heartthrobs and undying loves

and marital fantasies that occupied the minds and hearts
(and hormones) of most Elizabethan teenagers through-
out the "age of adolescency." They wouldn't actually do
anything about them for several years, for the marria ge
agp waogprpri.^jngl y late— for gjrls, twcnty-five ort^^^eZns^
StTanHfor boys,
•

^
enty-eight or twe nty-nmeTKaEy brides
hke Juliet, who "hatlT nut sctn tlTT change' of fourteen
years," or fifteen-year-old Miranda of The Tempest, were
the exceptions, even for the upper classes.
There were very practical reasons for putting off mar-
riage. Later marriages meant smaller families and in a
society that was already bursting at the seams with peo-
ple, big families meant big problems. Delayed marriage
was the insurance policy Elizabethan society took out to
guarantee that married couples would be fi nancially able
to support a family. The law that required apprentice-
ships to last seven years was passed specifically to "curb
over hasty marriages and over soon setting up of house-
 THE TIES THAT BIND: FAMILY LIFE 97

holds by youth." In other words, people weren't allowed

to marry until they were economically independent. And
they weren't economically independent until they had
reached an age where they had either saved money from
their period of apprenticeship or inherited it from their
parents.
This reasoning was well founded. Babies often fol-
lowed close on the heels of marriage and were quite pos-
sibly the major cause of it; probably f^^f^^ nut r>f .^^A/^r^;,
three blushing Elizabethan brides ^v^^ prpgn^nt r^n ht-r
"wedding day This happened to the newlywed Shake-
.

speare, whose first child was born a few months after his
marriage to Anne Hathaway; and it happened to another
Elizabethan couple, who had themselves married and their
baby baptized on the same day!
It wasn't always that these couples were playing fast
and loose with each other; it had more to do with how
people usually went about getting engaged and married.
The way the system worked a promise to marry someone
,
^

was considered just as vali3 and binding an agreement'

^s the actuaF cerernOnv. Onoe inieniions had been de-
clared (honorable or not), the couple was free to act as
if they were married.

This was widely accepted but not universally em-

braced. Although he celebrates the betrothal of his daugh-
ter Miranda, Prospero feels called on to warn Ferdinand
of dire consequences "If thou dost break her virgin-knot
before All sanctimonious ceremonies may With full and
holy rite be ministered." Often these betrothal arrange-
ments spelled trouble, especially for young women. When
Claudio and Julietta make just such an agreement in Meas-
ure for Measure —
"upon a true contract I got possession
of Julietta's bed," Claudio vows, "You know the lady; she
is fast my wife. Save that we do the denunciation lack Of

—
outward order" Julietta becomes pregnant.
These pregnancies before-the-fact wer e generally toler -
—
ated as lon g as the pregnant ma id became a pregnan t
'bride But solncliliiLs, fui une leaSon or another, the mar-
.

riagd ceremony didn't happen. The young girl's fiance may

have been forced into military service by a press-gang. Or
perhaps the groom-to-be called things off when the bride's
dowry didn't meet expectations, as Angelo is said to have
done in Measure for Measure; when Mariana's brother was
 a
98 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

shipwrecked and her dowry lost just before the marriage,

the treacherous Angelo "swallowed his. vows whole, pre-
tending in her discoveries of dishonor." Or perhaps the
betrothed was one who "never means to wed where he
hath wooed," as Katherina says in Tlie Taming of the Shrew.
When someone who, under better circumstances, would
have been a pregnant bride became an unwed mother
instead, the consequences were dire. She might be fired
from her job and kicked out of the parish; and even as
she was in the throes of giving birth to this bastard infant,
the midwife would refuse to lift a finger until she gasped
out the name of the father.
In a society where resources were already drained,
—
women who brought bastards into the world unless they
—
could manage to find a man to support them paid dearly.
Small wonder that some women resorted to the horrifying
alternatives of herb-induced abortion and infanticide by
poison or suffocation.

Once a happy young Elizabethan couple had fulfilled

all the requirements —
financial independence and paren-
tal approval — they could crown their courtship with an ac-
tual church wedding. This was a great occasion, full of fun
and festivity: as Petruchio declares in The Taming of the
Shrew, "We will have rings and things, and fine array;
And kiss me, Kate, we will be married o' Sunday." The
church ceremony was the standard Church of England
formula, complete with promises to love, honor, and obey.
But the real fun started with the reception or wedding
feast — what Elizabethans called the bride-ale and what
Puritans referred to as "public incendiaries of ail filthy
lusts." This was usually quite a party, replete with food
and drink, jigs and dances, bawdy songs, and gifts for the
guests. Poor couples' celebrations were fairly modest —
simple dinner, party favors of ribbons and gloves, lots of
—
noisy bell-ringing but the upper classes generally put on
a spectacular show, often drawing people from neighbor-
ing villages and parishes to gape and gawk. Such feasting,
drinking, and all-around extravagance could go on for
several days. The affair finally ended when friends of the
newlyweds subjected them to the bawdy ceremony of
"bedding" on their first night as man and wife. And so
married life began.
 THE TIES THAT BIND: FAMILY LIFE 99

The Dynamic Duo

There was no shortage of writings and sermons by con-

temporar>' critics and preachers advising a new couple on
how to have the ideal marriage. The pair who followed
their advice might achieve what the Duke of Suffolk {Henry
VI Part J) ca lls "a pattern of celestial peace."
The wife) was, of course, enjoined to be meek, patient,
]

.quiet, and willing to put ]ip with whatever her husband

dished out. The ^usban dlhad a res ponsibility to look out
for his wife, to provide f or her, ana to be patient w ith her
w^omanly frailties and shortcomings. He was to be careful
not to abuse his power over her but to treat her with
kindness. After all. Eve was created not from man's head
or foot, but from his side, and so his wife should be, to
some extent, his companion.
In fact, marriage probably turned out to b e much more
of a partnersh ip than the se wTitings implje d. In a sense it
—
had to be the game of survival was too strenuous for
half of the team to sit idly on the bench. For th e^class of
^
w
poor landless laborers ho depended exclusively on wages
for a living, it was particularly crucial for }]oth sp o uses to
_wnr^ -T^^ wife might spin wool to sell to her weav'CT^
Tiusband's employer, help with the weeding, the haymak-
ing, and the harvesting, work in the village alehouse, take
in washing, and do any other odd job that might bring in
a little more income.
At the other end of the economic spectrum, ji pper-class
women often seemed more ornamental than essential to
the operations of the household. But, in fact, many of them
had a large hand in running the estate, particularly the
wives of husbands who traveled on business. The wife
would oversee the estate manager who collected the rents
from tenants, handle a large staff of servants, and super-
vise the various other operations that went with running
a household and the accompanying acres of land. She
might also be called on for her knowledge of delivering
babies, mixing herbal remedies, or making repairs.
The spouses \v>in\vnr}cprj tnprpthpr pl^y^d tnopthpr, tOO,
and spent their free time engaging in any number of ac-
tivities. Young gentrv- couples held dinners or went to Lon-
 !

1 00 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

don for parties; the less well-off sampled the newest batch
of beer in the local alehouse or danced a measure at the
village harvest celebration. Many couples spent whole eve-
nings just talking to each other, or reading together, and
there is every reason to believe that most felt a deep and
abiding affection for each other. After all Margaret Dakins
had been through, she seemed to have found happiness
at last; her third (and final) husband spoke in his will of
"the extraordinary affection that was between her and my-
self in our life-time," and wore a bracelet with her picture
inside it until the day he died. Another affectionate old
man wrote to his wife, "Of all the joys I have under God
the greatest is yourself. To think that I possess one so
faithful, and one that I know loves me so dear, is the . . .

greatest comfort this earth can give."

But where there was room for happiness, there was
also room for Hi5;rnp tent Some couples quarreled fre-
quently. Perhaps the wife proved unexpectedly insensitive,
or the husband felt that he was locked into an arranged
or forced marriage he had never wanted in the first place.
As the Duke of Suffolk asks (with his own ulterior motives)
in Henry VI Part 1 "For what is wedlock forced but a hell.
,

An age of discord and continual strife?" When Helena

confides in Diana that her husband Bertram hates her, in
All's Well That Ends Well, Diana sympathizes: "Alas, poor
ladv! 'Tis a hard bondage to become the wife Of a detesting
lord."
And bond^g^e jt often wa s. Marriage was indeed a "world-
without-end bargain, as the Princess reminds the King
in Love's Labor's Lost. If the quarrels didn't resolve them-
selves, or if one person realized that the marriage should
never have taken place, there simply wasn't much that
could be done about it. Divorce was unthinkable: only a
private act of Parliament could procure one, and that,
obviously, was a rarity. Church courts could annul (or
cancel) the marriage but first required proof that the spouse
was already married to someone else, or that the marriage
was unconsummated. The same court could also order a
physical separation on the grounds of adultery or physical
abuse (battered wives, for example), but this, too, was
unusual.
Once again, the poor were freer; they actually had a
couple of escape hatches. The couple could simply sepa-
 THE TIES THAT BIND: FAMILY LIFE 1 1

rate unofficially, and no one would take much notice. Men

could exercise another option — walking out. Given the
primitive communications and the terrible roads, a de-
serting husband could be pretty sure he'd never be tracked
down by a vengeful wife. He might even marr\' again and
start a new lif^lsewhere. More often, though, these run-
away husbands became homeless vagrants or criminals.
That was all well and good for the poor. But for those
who had serious wealth or property to think about, de-
sertion w^as out of the question. Short of following Othello's
example and killing the hated spouse, unhappy husbands
or wvv^es just had to put up with their predicament untll_
death j eli^v<"d thern ot the burden. Given the low life ex-
pectancy, however, an unhappy couple might not have too
long to wait; "till death do us part" could be a matter of
years, not decades. Rare was the Elizabethan couple who
celebrated a golden anniversary; the average marriage lasted
around twenty years.

When death brought an end to a happy marriage, as

itso frequently did, the surviving spouse was often dev-
astated. Many Elizabethans were cast into deep depres-
sion by the death of their mate; a few even committed
suicide. One upper-class woman refused to leave her room
for a full year after her husband's death. In The Two Gentle-
men of Verona, Silvia appeals to her friend Eglamour's
memory of his beloved: "Thyself hast loved, and I have
heard thee say No grief did ever come so near thy heart
As when thy lady and thy true love died, Upon whose grave
thou vowedst pure chastity." Aegeon's wife in Tlie Comedy
of Errors follows a similarly chaste existence after she is
separated from her husband in a shipwreck: she enters a
convent.
More often than not, bereaved husbands and wives
chose neither death nor chastity but remarriage. A young
Elizabethan man or woman who had had an unhappy first
marriage might be eager to make it work the second time
around. Even many of those who grieved eventually re-
—
signed themselves to remarrying it was virtually a ne-
cessity. A middle-aged merchant simply couldn't cope with
the children on his own; a young widow needed help with
the farm she'd inherited — and indeed, such a propertied
woman would have plenty of suitors, for many an aspiring
102 SHAKESPEARE alive!

Elizabethan male hoped to build a fortune and a career

by marrying a widow.
Remarriage was pretty much taken for granted during
Elizabethan times. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Master
Ford, commenting on his wife's close friendship with Mis-
tress Page, speculates, "I think, if your husbands were
dead you two would marry." Mistress Page's retort "Be
—
— —
sure of that two other husbands" points to the inevi-
table realities of English life in the sixteenth century. For
Mistress Page knew, as many Elizabethans did, that no
matter how discouraging the setbacks and how great the
obstacles, the show must go on. And marriage, in the end,
was the only real show in town.
PART III
In Shakespeare's London, all the world seemed to be
a stage. (The opening scene from the 1983 New York
Shakespeare Festival production of King Richard III.)
Photo: Martha Swope
 CHAPTER 7

The Revolution
OF 1576: The
Theatre Is Born

Something happened in 1 576, a history-making event that

had a profound impact on the course of world theater. A
man named James Burbage, who had worked much of his
Hfe as a carpenter before becoming a full-time actor, signed
a lease on some land outside London, and constructed a
— —
building the Theatre exclusively for dramatic repre-
sentation in the English language.
Without this shrewd and courageous move, actors,
playwrights, and English drama itself might never have
gained the permanence, independence, and truly profes-
sional status they needed to live and flourish. The construc-
tion of the first permanent, custom-built playhouse in
England was without a doubt an event that altered every-
—
thing in the theater forever after especially since it be-
came the first theatrical home for the greatest dramatist
in the English language, William Shakespeare.

The World Before

THE Theatre

Of course the fact that there hadn't been any playhouses

in England before 1576 didn't mean that there hadn't been
 —
106 SHAKESPEARE alive!

any plays or actors. Quite the contrary. In the httle villages

and hamlets sprinkled across the country, drama was a
part of daily life. Throughout the Middle Ages and up until
1576, acting in plays wasn't a separate occupation limited
to trained professionals in a permanent theater. Ijt was
merry-making, a participatory activity, something every-
one could do for fun during holidays, church festivals,
and harvest celebrations. Plays and entertainments, color-
ful pageants, tumbling and juggling, various games, and
group dancing were all basic features of such seasonal
parties and one-time occasions. There were also, of course,
traveling minstrels attached as "servants" to the house-
holds of noble patrons. These entertainers crisscrossed the
countryside singing and dancing for any audience they
could scrape together.
Despite a small degree of organization within this
apparent chaos, the theater was still pretty much a slap-
dash affair. Throughout the medieval period, drama was
for amateurs. In the early days, respectable craftsmen
woodworkers, carpenters, cobblers, and so on put on —
Bible-based plays under the auspices of their particular
guild organization (a cross between a trade union and a
social service club). These plays, financed by a guild and
travelingfrom town to town on colorful pageant wagons,
brought to life the biblical stories of Adam and Eve, Noah,
or Moses, of Jesus' birth, and of the Devil's attempts to
lure mankind into eternal damnation. Such plays were per-
formed entirely for the glory of God and were very def-
initely not-for-profit affairs — vivacious, fast-paced, brightly-
painted and gorgeously-costumed spectacles, crammed full
of action and display, and laden, of course, with moral
teachings.
In the decades leading up to the great year of 1576,
these old traditions were combined and transformed into
"*

a krn n^of itinerant theater Groups of actors, or strolling

.

players, would travel around England, drumming up au-

diences and putting on plays whenever and wherever they
thought they had a chance of financial success. Unlike
their medieval predecessors, these players were semi-
professionals; many of them earned the better part of their
living from the hat they passed around at the end of their
performances. To keep that hat full, they had to keep giv-
 THE REVOLUTION OF 576: THE THEATRE
1 IS BORN 1 07

ing their audiences what they wanted and what they were
used to —lots of characters, rich costuming, and such elab-
orate stage effects as Hell belching smoke, angels descend-
ing from on high, frightful earthquakes, loud thunderous
storms, and burning altars.
These strolling players had inherited the old pageant
traditions of theater the lively spectacles the vivid sound
,

and sight ettects, and the fast pace of earlier theatrical

presentations. At the same time, they had to contend with
a problem that the craft guilds had not had to worr\' about:
far fewer resources.
To start with, an average group of strolling players was
much smaller than the old-style craft guilds, usually some-
where between fi\'^ and eigh t people. Because these actors
were always on the road (in a time before big tour buses
and trucks were around to earn- hea\y equipment and
costumes) and were limited to one or two packhorses and
a small wagon or two at best, they had to keep baggage
to a minimum. What's more, because they were earning
their living from performing, it was in their interest to
hold down the operating costs as much as possible. This
"meant that they were severely restncted mthe props, cos-
tumes, and stage machiner\' they could take along.
The result, of course, was a starkly simple production.
The stage was nothing more than a rectangular wooden
platform resting on top of several barrels. A cloth-covered
booth functioned as a kind of makeshift dressing room,
hiding the actors while they changed costume. There
wPTpq't m;^ny prop ^ or much sccncrv. The limited cast
ffieant that doubling ot part s was absolutely essential; an
actor could routinely expect to play three or four parts in
the course of a two-hour play. The notion of hiring extras
to fill in the gaps was laughable, given the already stretched
financial resources of the group. The actors just had to do
the best they could.
And yet with energy and inventiveness, the strolling
players managed to overcome these obstacles and offer to
their nationwide audiences a truly popular theater. The
play they presented, whether a Biblical stor\- or a morality
play, was a great combination of slap-dash and energy, as
actors dashed backstage to change tie-on beards from gray
to blond or ginger to while, caps from a nobleman's to an
 bHAKtbftAKt ALU t:

apprentice's, and gowns from a Moorish servant's to a

woman's — time to re-enter tw o minutes and twenty-
all in
five lines later as a completely different character.
Their plav s minded the comic and the tragic without
apolog\', disregarding classical theories of drama going
back to Aristotle that drew a firm line between "Comedies,
[which] begin in trouble, and end in peace," and "Tra-
gedies, [which] begin in calms, and end in tempest," as
an ancient saying had it, and insisted on unity of time,
place, or action. As far as the itinerant players were con-
cerned, if the audience liked a play, theories of genre
could go by the wayside. It wouldn't be at all unusual to
see a new play at this time billed as "Conflict of Conscience
... An excellent new comedy . containing the most
. .

lamentable historv', of the desperation of Francis Spera";

and Shakespeare pokes fun at the company of players
in A Midsummer Night's Dream who perform "A tedious
brief scene of young Pyramus And his love Thisbye; very
tragical mirth."
As these popular actors were strolling their way through
the sixteenth century, traversing England in search of a
livelihood, London was growing by leaps and bounds. The
city was fast becoming the economic, political, and cul-
tural capital of the nation, the center of trade, the home
of ihe royal Court, and the final destination of an increas-
ing flood of migrants from the countryside. London, in short,
had it all; it was a city that offered unlimited opportunities
to the sharp-witted and profit-minded. It didn't take en-
terprising actors long to realize that where there was a
large population and a lot of commerce, there would also
be large audiences. And so without further ado, they packed
up their bags, loaded up their packhorses, and moved to
the big city.

Once an acting troupe had made its way inside the city
gates,it might make arrangements with the owner of a

popular London tavern or inn to set up a stage, on a some-

what temporar\' basis, in the enclosed but roofless yard
of his establishment. This arrangement satisfied everyone.
The manager of the inn was happy since, in addition to
the fee he charged the acting company for using his fa-
cilities, he was also selling more beer and alehouse buns
to the audiences. The actors were delighted to have a place
 THE REVOLUTION OF 1 576: THE THEATRE IS BORN 1 09

to perform, a ready-made audience of drinkers and eaters

to perform for, and sometimes even a place to store cos-
tumes and props inside the tavern. No doubt they feh right
at home there at the Boar's Head or the Bel Savage or the
Red Lion, performing on a platform stage just like the one
they'd used in the traveling days, surrounded by an au-
dience on three sides. Of course, if there was no room at
the inn, an acting troupe might be able to set up a tem-
porary' stage in one of the outdoor bearbaiting arenas, a
rounded building with a two-stor\- galleiy and a sandy
unpaved yard w here the bear fought off attacks from trained
dogs.
In general, these two pre- 1576 outdoor arrangements
served the acting troupes well. But city officials, who
considered the bands of players irresponsible vagrants,
instigators of unrest, and ringleaders of riotousness, were
constantly tiying to prohibit the actors from playing in
the innyards or bearvards (which were within their ju-
risdiction), put them out of business, and throw them
out of London. At first, because the actors preferred the
convenience of performing within the city limits, they
were willing to put up with this constant hassle, and they
were able to withstand the assaults because of the backing
of the noble patrons. But after a while it became too
difficult.
You can almost imagine James Burbage sitting down
with a quill and parchment one afternoon, after a partic-
ularly heated argument with the proprietor of the innyard
(who had just had a particularly unpleasant visit from the
city authorities), to make a checklist of the ideal condi-
tions under which he and his fellow players could continue
acting professionally. Leaving out the patronage and pro-
tection of a nobleman, which he already had, he would
—
probably have written down "location" outside the city's
walls and the city's jurisdiction; "structure" probably
an outdoor building, with no more than a couple of en-
—
tries to ensure that no one got in without paying; "size"
— enough capacity to hold a large paying audience; and
"reliability" —
the actors had to be able to count on having
a place that they wouldn't be thrown out of on a moment's
notice.
Perhaps it was at just about this time that a plot of
land came up for rent in the parish of Saint Leonard's, in
110 SHAKESPEARE alive!

the Shoreditch area about a mile north of London. Dis-

gruntled, fed up, but nonetheless determined not to let
the city officials close him down, Burbage seized the day,
borrowed the capital from his brother-in-law (a prosper-
ous grocer and businessman), and within a short time,
signed the lease. Construction started in the spring of 1576;
several months later, the building was complete. Burbage
—
named it the Theatre the first time that word had been
used in English to refer to a place for plays.

The Plot Heard Round

THE World

The wonderful straightforwardness of its name the —

—
Theatre was matched only by its architecture simple—
and functional, designed to hold as many people as pos-
sible. Inbuilding his outdoor or open-air theater, Burbage
took his cue from the bear-gardens his acting troupe had
previously performed in; like a bearbaiting amphitheater,
the Theatre was a round (or rather, many-sided), un-
roofed, wooden building. But with an eye on bigger profits,
Burbage made some improvements on this model. Instead
of settling for a dirt yard that could turn all too easily to
mire and mud, he paved the "pit," as it was called, with
brick or stone. And he added a third floor of gallery (or
balcony) seating to the standard two-storv theater, thereby
increasing the capacity of his playhouse considerably, per-
haps to over two thousand people.
The stage, too, underwent revision. Burbage's stage
was no temporary slab of wood; rather, it was a permanent
rectangular platform, probably twenty-five by forty-five
feet. Instead of resting on barrels, it was supported on
sturdy posts and extended well out into the yard. At the
back of the stage was a wall with a couple of doors, for
entrances and exits, and behind this wall was the players'
dressing room, or the "tiring-house" (for their attire). The
stage cover, called the "heavens," stretched out over the
stage platform, from the tiring-house to the pillars at
 THE REVOLUTION OF 1 576: THE THEATRE IS BORN 1 1 1

the front of the stage. On top of the heavens was a httle

hut where the trumpeter proclaimed the start of a per-
formance, stagehands operated the stage machiner\-, and
the company flag fluttered in the breeze.
With this building, a trend was being set in theater
architecture that would last for decades. Aside from a few-
individual variations, all subsequent public theaters of this
time, unlike the indoor private theaters that offered more
elitist entertainment, followed Burbage's basic plan. The
—
KTically-named theaters the Curtain, the Swan, the Rose,
—
the Fortune, and the great Globe itself were many-sided
open-air amphitheaters with a wooden frame, a pa\ed
yard, a projecting stage, and the rest.
In building the Theatre, Burbage helped establish ac-
tors and drama as permanent and accepted aspects of
Elizabethan life. Not only did his theater encourage a reg-
ular audience and therefore regular profits, but it could
physically accommodate the storage of a larger number
of more substantial props and costumes. It provided the
money and the resources to support a larger permanent
cast, to hire extras, to acquire the best plays, and to im-
prove the facilities. In short, the Theatre gave security and
independence to drama, conditions under which it could
expand and develop.
Now theater people could flap their wings as much as
—
they wanted provided, of course, that they did so beyond
the city limits and beyond the legal reach of the city au-
thorities, who would have liked nothing better than to
pluck their feathers. Because the outdoor theaters at-
tracted such large audiences and supposedly promoted a
dangerous, unrestrained atmosphere, acting troupes pre-
ferred to remain safely outside the city, in the suburbs to
the north and south of London.
There were indoor theaters closer to the city, like the
one in Blackfriars. Small and intimate, they had a capacity
of only five or six hundred compared to the two or three
thousand the Globe or the Swan could hold. They were
lit by candlelight, charged six times as much admission

as their public counterparts, and had no friendly standing

room equivalent to the yard of the outdoor theaters. For
a while indoor theaters were used mainly by the compa-
nies consisting exclusively of boy actors, who offered a
 !

112 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

particular kind of play replete with literary devices and

rich in clever satire. Early in the seventeenth century the
adult companies, led by the King's Men, took over these
theaters and began using them for the winter season, in-
heriting the boy companies' audiences.
Although these private houses would one day become
theater headquarters, for the moment the outdoor public
theaters held sway, proliferating on both sides of the
Thames. For the first few years after 1576, they were lo-
cated mostly to the north of London in the Shoreditch
area. The Theatre was about a mile north of London's east
end, across Finsbury Fields. The Curtain went up nearby,
shortly after the Theatre was finished, while the Fortune's
lot was farther toward the city's west end. The Red Bull,
an inn converted to a playhouse, stood even further west,
completing the northern group.
Gradually, though, there was a general migration south
across the Thames to a suburb called Southwark, an area
with a fine open meadow and lots to do (taverns, gambling
houses, bearbaiting arenas, brothels, and so on). In 1587,
a particularly powerful theater entrepreneur named Philip
Henslowe opened the Rose Playhouse in the garden of an
inn in Southwark. The Swan appeared a few years later,
and just before the end of the century, the Globe was built
by Shakespeare's company.
In the late 1 590s, dramatic activity was flourishing in
the public theaters. A different play was performed every
day at each of the several public playhouses outside Lon-
don; the two "theater districts" to the north and south of
the Thames were bustling with activity; and the profits
were rolling in.
Tourists from abroad often commented admiringly
on the quantity and quality of dramatic activity around
London. One tourist praised the pleasing physical aspects
of the theater: "The playhouses are so constructed that
they play on a raised platform so that everyone can see
the whole spectacle. The actors are most expensively and
beautifully dressed. ." And another visitor summed up
. .

the London scene: "Without [outside] the city are some

theaters where English actors almost every day represent
tragedies and comedies to very numerous audiences; these
are concluded with excellent music, variety of dances, and
the great applause of the audience."
 THE REVOLUTION OF 1 576: THE THEATRE IS BORN 1 1 3

Battle Lines Drawn

Unfortunately not everyone wore the enchanted spec-

tacles of tourists. London in the 1580s and 1590s was also
the setting for numerous clashes between enemies and
friends of the theater; London city officials, flanked by sev-
eral special-interest groups, squared- off against the Privy
Council (the ruling cabinet, composed of the most pow-
erful nobles in the land).Court aristocrats, and ultimately
Queen Elizabeth herself.
—
The Court aristocracy leapt gracefully, of course to —
the aid of the embattled actors time and time again, and
the Privy Council (whose members included the patrons
of the two leading London companies, the Lord Cham-
berlain and the Lord Admiral) did their best to thwart the
peevish city authorities, unless it was politically impos-
sible. After all, entertainers and players had been under
noble patronage as far back as anyone could remember.
Medieval minstrels had delighted aristocratic households
with singing, playing of instruments, tumbling, conjuring
tricks, sword fights, poetic recitations, and puppet shows;
— —
attached to and protected by a nobleman, actors pro-
vided entertainment for his parties and celebrations. It
was an old and proud tradition that the nobles intended
to uphold now that companies were establishing them-
selves permanently in London.
The theater was also an important part of the aristo-
cratic social and cultural life. The actors brought the latest
hit plays to Court every winter season, performing in the
indoor halls for the queen and her courtiers. For this
—
reason and the additional fact of the noblemen's own
love of the arts— the Court defended theater activities; its
support was often what saved the actors from an ignom-
inious end at the hands of the city bureaucrats.
Many Londoners who had to live on location with
the theaters and actors were much less enthusiastic than
the Court aristocrats. Everyone seemed to have something
to say about the theater —
outraged Puritans, disgruntled
entertainment competitors, and protective London au-
thorities. The growth of drama into large-scale, popular
entertainment was raising a lot of questions and fears in
1 14 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

people's minds. No longer were productions just ama-

teurish activities confined to noblemen's households or
seasonal church and agricultural celebrations. Drama was
now a fearful commercial force to be reckoned with.
In general, the Lord Mayor and his council of aldermen
(or henchmen, as they sometimes seemed to be) did every-
thing they could to make life miserable for acting com-
panies. To these officials' way of thinking, the new popular
theater might have unpredictable and alarming conse-
quences. How would it affect peace and order on the city
streets? Would impressionable young people get evil ideas
in their heads from this unrestrained type of visual en-
tertainment? What if neighborhoods where theaters were
being built protested that they didn't want all the noise
and riffraff? And who would control how much the players
should charge, and when they could perform?
The mayor and the city councillors seemed to be most
worried about the consequences of bringing large groups
of Londoners together in a public theater. In the first
place, the dreaded bubonic plague could spread quickly
and uncontrollably in a tightly-packed arena. As one re-
straining order explained, "In time of God's visitation by
the plague such assemblies of the people in throng and
press [crowds] have been very dangerous for spreading
of infection." This rule didn't just apply to theaters; all
public gatherings were prohibited during outbreaks of the
notorious epidemic.
But city officials were also plagued by a fear of the
moral contagion of the theater. Although they weren't fa-
miliar with the term "mob psycholog\'," the likelihood of
a large boisterous crowd turning into a riotous mob ter-
rified the officials. If a riot did break out, they had no
—
means of controlling it no police force, no National Guard,
no standing army.
The one or two theater-related incidents that did occur
were more than enough to convince the authorities
that they were right. The street rioting that broke out one
morning after a young dandy "prodded" the stomach of a
—
young apprentice sleeping outside the Theatre although
it wasn't directly connected with a performance — was
enough to vindicate the authorities in their own eyes. As
far as they were concerned, such an incident could have
 5
THE REVOLUTION OF 1 576: THE THEATRE IS BORN 1 1

been performance-related; actors could communicate

dangerous ideas by portraying rebellion in a play. To guard
against this, the Revels Office insisted that anything con-
sidered even slightly provocative be cut out. Shakespeare
himself felt the muscle behind this prohibition: the depo-
sition scene in Richard II, where the rightful monarch is
deprived of his throne and royal powers, was seen only
—
once in his day and illegally at that. The Revels Office
had censored the scene as politically subversive, but the
Earl of Essex, planning a rebellion against the queen, per-
suaded the Lord Chamberlain's Men to give a special per-
formance that included the deposition scene. As a result
the actors were hauled into court, although they were
subsequently let off.
Sometimes the city authorities carried their anti-
theater campaign onto legal battlefields. They tried to reg-
ulate exactly how many performances the players could
give each week, what time they could start, which days
were to be allowed as performance days. Several times
they actually tried to shut down the playhouses. But even
when the antagonistic authorities were successful in prod-
ding the Priw Council to issue an order closing the thea-
ters, there was no guarantee that it would be obeyed. Late
in the 1580s, for example, acting on the orders of the Lord
Treasurer of the Privy Council, the Lord Mayor of London
(no doubt rubbing his palms with undisguised glee) sent
for the two leading companies in London and commanded
them to stop playing; one of the companies "verv dutifully
obeyed," but the other group of actors, fumed the Lord
Mayor, "in very contemptuous manner departing from
me," went straight to the Cross-Keys, a London innyard,
and gave a performance that very same afternoon!
Several years later, responding to international outrage
over a seditious play called The Isle of Dogs, the Priw
Council ordered that plays be stopped and playhouses
"plucked down"; but theater people just kept a low profile
for a while and the order was never really carried out.
Though their voices grew fainter, the city authorities kept
protesting without much hope of getting their hearts' de-
sire, namely the permanent closing of the theaters. For
that, they would have to wait until almost halfway through
the next centurv.
 6
1 1 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

Although the creation of new theaters spawned a great

variety —
of jobs for builders, contractors, architects,
draftsmen, surveyors, carpenters, plasterers, painters,
—
property men, carters, printers, lawyers there were some
tradespeople who clamored against this new industry, par-
ticularly those who stood to lose financially from the thea-
ter's gain. Their basic gripe, or so they said, was that plays
were drawing apprentices and servants from their work.
But the truth of the matter was that they greatly resented
actors as rivals and competitors.
For although players were nominally professional
craftsmen, they remained free of confining guild obliga-
tions such as dues and rules; they grew rich by selling
their "wit," an intangible commodity that couldn't be reg-
ulated by commercial restrictions. This freedom infuri-
ated merchants and business people who did have to operate
under limitations, and they refused to accept that "play-
ing" was working.
The sellers of rival forms of entertainment were also
distressed by the possible loss of business that theaters
might cause them. For with an admission price of only a
penny, playhouses could undersell all other popular di-
versions except bearbaiting, which also cost a penny. Busi-
ness at the taverns, the eating places, and the gambling
houses might fall off if people began to flock to the thea-
ters. Only the watermen, ferrying audience members back
and forth across the Thames, were sure to profit.
Joining the ranks of rival businesses, preachers and
Puritan citizens lent their moral soldiery to the attack on
the theater. They spoke out vehemently against all aspects
of dramatic entertainment, denouncing actors, audiences,
playwrights, and everyone who had anything to do with
them as wicked and corrupt. The playhouse is "Satan's
synagogue," said one minister; another called it "the nest
of the Devil and the sink of all sin." One preacher even
blamed theater for the plague; in an irrefutable syllo-
gism, he reasoned, "The cause of plagues is sin, if you look
to it well: and the cause of sin are plays: therefore the
cause of plagues are plays."
From the pulpit and in pamphlets, these groups ob-
jected to the extravagance and high costs of this temporary
pleasure, "the waste of expenses in these spectacles that
 — 7

THE REVOLUTION OF 1 576: THE THEATRE IS BORN 1 1

scarce last, like shoes of brown paper." The playhouses

themselves were "a continual monument of London's
prodigality and folly."
They condemned what in their eyes was the shockingly
lustfulbehavior of the audience, particularly of the young
men who scanned the audience for a likely pickup: "In
our assemblies at plays in London, you shall see such
heaving, and shoving, such itching and shouldering, to sit
by women," one writer ranted. Another raved that the
wicked flock to the theaters, where "such laughing and fleer-
ing; such kissing and bussing; such clipping and culling,
such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like
is used."
Plavwrights were held to be no better, accused of sac-
rificing virtueand truth to the power of the almighty pound.
And actors were nothing more than double-dealing coun-
terfeiters; the boy players who dressed up in women's
clothes came under special attack for provoking men to
lust and lechery.
—
Some Puritans discovered a converse and adverse
relationship between playgoing and churchgoing. "Are filthy
plays," asked one peevishly, "comparable to the word of
God?" In fact, part of what so enraged the preachers was
that the plays were taking away their audiences: "Do they
not draw the people from hearing the word of God, from
godly lectures, and sermons?" While the church was empty,
the yard of the theater was crammed with eager specta-
tors, who were gratifying their desires while damning their
souls. A mere two years after the opening of Burbage's
rival Theatre, a preacher/schoolteacher expressed his frus-
tration at religion's low ratings: "Will not a filthy play,
with the blast of a trumpet, sooner call thither a thousand,
then an hour's tolling of a bell bring to the sermon a
hundred?" The preachers were in the same competitive
position (although they might not have admitted it) as
alehouse owners; instead of money, howev^er, the burning
issue was people's souls.

Aside from the spleen being vented by the puritanical

sect, therewas a broader sense of uneasiness about the
nature of theater. Puritans weren't alone in feeling un-
—
comfortable with the dramatic illusion that is, the built-
in pretense, or lie, of the theater. An actor onstage in
 8 !

1 1 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

costume was pretending to be someone he wasn't; a stage

was giving the impression that it was a location it wasn't;
a play was a fiction, from start to finish, and yet it was a
fiction that masqueraded as the truth. The uncertain
boundaries between what was true and what was false
made lots of morally-inclined observers of the theater
squirm.
Every time these people went to a play they were re-
minded of the ambiguity of it all, for drama, especially
Shakespeare's, is constantly reflecting on its own nature.
He delights in creating plays within plays, prodding his
audience to think about the nature of the dramatic event
they are sharing, as in Hamlet's play-within-a-play.
Shakespeare's characters also ponder their dual exis-
tence as the characters within the play and the actors of
the play, knowing that they are double agents who are
involved as both at once and reminding the audience of
it repeatedly. Cassius and Brutus pause after the stabbing

of Caesar to consider this. Cassius says, "How many ages

hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states
unborn and accents yet unknown!"
Shakespeare was constantly exploring and referring to
—
the world of the theater audience, scene, role-playing,
—
the Globe itself and exploring the gap betwee n a ppear-
ance an dj^ealit y. This didn't do much to calm the palpi-
tations mthe breasts of worried moralists. One writer got
right to the heart of the matter: "In stage plays for a boy
to put on the attire, the gesture, the passions of a woman;
for a mean [lower-class] person to take upon him the title
of a Prince with counterfeit port [bearing] ... is by out-
ward figures to show themselves otherwise than they are,
and so within the compass of a lie."
The notion that someone could change identity, gen-
der, or social class simply by putting on a costume had
social implications that worried many upright Elizabe-
thans. In a society where the clothes someone put on in
the morning were a sign of his social class and strictly
regulated by law, costuming in the theater packed a real
punch.
For a lower-class actor to parade around the stage in
the lavish fabrics and rich jewels of his social betters was
also a sign of intolerable disorder. Worse still, it might
 9

THE REVOLUTION OF 1 576: THE THEATRE IS BORN 1 1

put subversive ideas into the heads of the socially inferior

people in the audience.
It wasn't plays on the page but plays on the stage that
were considered dangerous. The open and unashamed
pretending of stage performance, the shifting and unpre-
dictable dynamics of the relationship between the actors
and their audiences, the dishonesty of portraying some-
thing untrue as true made live performance seem far more
frightening and uncontrollable than docile printed black
letters on a sheet of paper. And so while reading plays was
acceptable, going to see them was not. For, in the words
of one Puritan, "Whatsoever such plays as contain good
matter, are set out in print, may be read with profit, but
cannot be played, without a manifest breach of God's com-
—
mandment." To put a play onstage or to see it enacted
— w^as to be an accomplice in~the untruths o f actin g ar^ d
the theater; a udiences were just as guilty and wicked as
"the actors. '

Luckily, most of this opposition was the work of only

a few vocal ministers and writers and didn't reflect popular
opinion. Backed by the theater-loving queen and Court,
actors suffered very little actual damage, other than per-
haps wounded egos.
By the 1590s, London was the theater capital of the
world. An Englishman who had traveled in many coun-
tries sang the praises of the London theater, declaring that
"as there be, in my opinion, more plays in London than
in all parts of the world I have seen, so do these players
or comedians excel all other in the world." And early in
the next century, the man who supervised all the dramatic
activity in London, the Master of Revels himself, would
exclaim, "That most ancient kind of poetrv', the dramatic,
is so lively expressed and represented upon the public
stages and theaters of this city," that it outdid even the
great days of ancient Rome.
Despite the protests, actors and stage-plays were in
London to stay. They had made their position clear in
1576 when the rise of Burbage's Theatre made a more
eloquent declaration of theatrical independence than any
written document ever could. But the opposition didn't
give up so easily, and in a few decades the lively and
crowded public theaters would become empty and lifeless
120 SHAKESPEARE alive!

spaces, boarded up and closed down when the Puritans

finally won the day.
These reversals were still in the future. For the time
being, in late sixteenth-century England, all the world
seemed to be a stage.
 CHAPTER 8

In Good Company
The Sixteenth-
Century Acting
Companies

If the young Mr. Shakespeare had arrived in London in

the mid- 1570s and asked the wayto the theater district,
—
he probably would have met with blank stares or, if he
were unlucky enough to have stopped a Puritan with his
question, he might have gotten a half-hour lecture on the
evils of stage-plays!
London there was nothing like New
In Shakespeare's
York Broadway or London's West End. Anything
City's
approaching theatrical organization was just beginning
to crystallize. At the core of this process were the profes-
sional acting companies of men and boys, which were
evolving through the years from groups of itinerant play-
ers to permanent organizations based in London.

Origins

The minstrel bands of the Middle Ages, the wander-

ing forefathers of the sixteenth-century actors, split into
two groups over time: the musicians (what we now
thmk of as minstrels), and the professional dramatic
players who were still under the protection of a nobleman.
122 SHAKESPEARE alive!

For these strolling plavers, being on tour was a wav of

life.
But their touring wasn't a matter of fixed concert dates,
enormous stadiums, record-breaking advance sales, or
wildly screaming fans. They moved randomly from town
to countryside, from aristocratic banqueting nails to hum-
ble village greens, sometimes heading to London for the
winter Court season and innyard performances going —
wherever the business might be. Traveling in small groups
of usually no more than three or four men, with a couple
of small wagons and a horse or two to carr\' the heavier
baggage, their usual procedure upon arriving in a new
town was to meet with the mayor, present their letter of
introduction, and get a license from him allowing them
to perform in the town square or in the cloisters under
the town libran,'.
These strolling troupes of actors lived from hand to
mouth, never sure what kind of reception or earnings lay
inside a town's walls. They were casually organized, loosely-
strung together, and living for the moment. In fact, they
were too casually organized for some village and town
authorities, who considered them annoyances, as much
a threat to a community's peace and quiet as any other
vagrant and homeless tvpes.
But whenever any authority figure threatened to make
real trouble for them, the players scurried to take refuge
in their status as servants of^ noWeman. They would
wave their letters oFlntrodiaction or recommendation in
the face of any petty official who had the nene to threaten
them, daring him to go against the honorable protection
of the Earl of Such-and-such or Lord So-and-so. Few^ local
authorities brazened out that dare.
The truth of the matter, however, was that many
of these noble patrons didn't have the slightest idea
of what their alleged "servants" were actually doing.
Many times the traveling players were servants in name
only, wearing the protective colors or the livery of the
household without perfonning any of a typical senant's
duties and without receiving regular wages. Thev had
the best of bot h world sMli e free dom accordegilQ-vagai^
'Bon gs~and lhe~p roTecUQn~]accQfded"toJempIoyees of a
Tiousehold.
 :

IN GOOD company: THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ACTING COMPANIES 123

Double Trouble

By the second half of the sixteenth centun the control ,

and supervision of these wandering actors had grown ver>'

lax. Small bands were wandering all over the countr>side
without any regulation, their numbers multiplying. Fi-
nally the government took steps to remedy the situation,
first by passing an act against illegal retainers or "mas-
terless men," sen^ants who wore the liven- but didn't do
the work. The crackdown continued with the Act for the
Punishment of Vagabonds, which put the traveling actors
outside the law:

All Fencers, Bear-wards, Common

Players in Inter-
ludes, & Baron of this
Minstrels, not belonging to any
realm or towards any other honorable Personage of
greater Degree, shall be taken, adjudged and deemed
Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars . . .

The law was unequivocal, and the penalties brutal; on the

first offense alone, these unfortunates were "to be griev-
ously whipped, and burnt through the gristle of the right
ear with a hot iron."
The poor players were in a no- win situation if they
were found wandenng around performing without the
protection of a nobleman, they were vagabonds if they ;

did have a noble's patronage, they had to prove that they

were servants in the true sense of the word, and not actors.
The effect of the Act of 1572 might have been to squelch
English drama for good. But what happened instead was
that many of the hangers-on disappeared, while players
who really did have aristocratic backing found other
ways to continue their playing —
namely, as permanent
professional companies in London.
The stor>- of the Earl of Leicester's Men is a perfect
example of how a coiripahy' survived the stringent new
regulations. When the statute against illegal retainers first
came out, these actors panicked, for although they were
card-carrying members of the Earl of Leicester's house-
hold, they really didn't have much formal standing with
124 SHAKESPEARE alive!

him. They wrote a letter immediately, begging him to keep

them on as legitimate servants so they could still claim
his patronage and protection under the new law.
The earl's reply was far more generous than they could
have hoped for: not only did he offer them his protection,
but in 1574, word came down from the queen herself
(overriding the opposition of the city authorities was one
of the privileges of being queen) that the Earl of Leicester's
Men were to be allowed to perform their plays in London.
The document conferring this privilege royally proclaimed
that Leicester's Men could now "use, exercise, and occupy
the art and faculty of playing Comedies, Tragedies, Inter-
ludes, [and] stage plays ... as well for the recreation of
our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure when
we shall think good to see them." The group of actors
—
must have been overjoyed what better protection could
there be than that given by Queen Elizabeth herself?
One of Leicester's players was Jam^S-Biirbage, that ex-
carpenter turned full-time actor. Combining his two crafts,
Burbage used the royal support as the cornerstone for the
first custom-made theater building in England.
And so by the late seventies, prospects looked bright
for Leicester's men and acting companies in general. The
first-ever roval permit had been granted to an acting com-
"pany to ply its trade in London, and permanent head-
quarters had been established in the brand-new Theatre.
Indeed, in the next two decades the drama business grew
rapidly; as new theaters went up, one after another, reg-
ular paying audiences began to provide a steady income,
and aspiring actors joined the ranks of established com-
panies.
But growth can be an untidy thing. Throughout the
1580s and 1590s, different groups were rising and falling
in popularity, forming, disbanding, and re-forming, scoot-
ing from one innyard to another, leaving town to tour the
provinces, reappearing without notice. If an acting group's
legitimacy was ever questioned by suspicious city au-
thorities, the group (echoing the earlier appeals to the
protection of noble patrons) usually professed to be "the
Queen's Players."
In fact, there was a real company called the Queen's
Men in the eighties, formed in 1583 by the Master of
 —
IN GOOD company: THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ACTING COMPANIES 1 25

Revels. It was a sort of all-star team of actors from the

different acting companies around London, and it was
definitely the most prestigious group in town. For several
years its chief drawing card was Richard Tarlton, the curly-
haired, squint-eyed, flat-nosed, drum-beating clown who
specialized in dancing jigs and making up verses on the
spur of the moment. In 1588, when Tarlton died, the for-
tunes of the company took a plunge. But one of the tenets
of the theater profession is that one group's exit is anoth-
er's entrance, and there was certainly no shortage of acting
groups willing to take over the position of the Queen's
Men as the premier company of the day.
The only constants in this easily changing environment
were the theaters, which anchored the drifting companies
to solid ground. Indeed, a company's first order of busi-
ness once the performing patent (or permit) had been
secured was to find a playhouse. The usual method was
to approach the theater owner or manager (called the
house-keeper) who had subleased the theater and make a
deal with him: in return for half of the gallery profits, the
actors would be allowed to occupy the theater building
—
and call it theirs for a set period of time.
The situation pleased everyone. The owner or manager
had a steady paying tenant, and the actors had the security
of a long lease and a place to call their own.

In these wooden, outdoor theaters, the once-itinerant

acting troupes found a relatively permanent home. The
lease on the theater gave them a new lease on life: those
who were previously vagabonds and "unrespectable" rogues
could now leave the wandering life, settle down in theaters
that belonged to them and get on with the business of
playing to eager audiences.
And so, as a contemporary historian tells us, acting
m
wen t fro being a pas time for amateurs to becoming "an
occ upation; and many ihere were thai tolluwed it fui h
'
livelihood.' From the 1570s on, acting was considered a
trade— but not a completely respectable one.
Establishing themselves as serious professionals was
a struggle; in a society that was acutely sensitive to every
shade of order and degree, actors were in the awkward
position of having no position, no obvious status. People
 !

1 26 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

weren't quite sure where they belonged or how they would

be kept in their place once that place had been decided.
This uncertainty sometimes led to dislike and resistance.
Another strike against the actors was the fact that many
of them had left their god-given trades to pursue the god-
forsaken craft of acting. This was a slap in the faces of
those who believed that each person had one and only
one proper calling (or vocation) in life, given to him by
God. Falstaff defends his thievery on these grounds in
Henry IV Part I: "Why, Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal. 'Tis no
sin for a man to labor in his vocation."
The actor James Burbage, for example, had once been
a carpenter, but "reaping but a small living by the same,
gave it over and became a common player in plays." An-
other member of his company, Robert Armin, had been
apprenticed to a goldsmith before the theater lured him
away.
Most actors had come from the artisan class, and thus
were of humble origin. The fact that many were actually
making a profit from acting only made matters worse. As
a citywide proclamation announced, "It hath not been
used or thought meet [appropriate] heretofore that players
should have or should make their living on the art of
playing."

A Rung on the Ladder

Despite these disapproving words, actors went right on

pursuing the art of playing. Because commercial theater
was nothing if not a business enterprise, it was not sur-
prising that sixteenth-century acting companies organized
themselves along much the same lines as other profit-
making institutions, complete with stockholders ("sharers"),
managers ("house-keepers"), regular employees ("hired
men"), and young interns ("boy apprentices"). Each of
these had a specific place in the hierarchy of the company,
with specific duties and privileges.
There were usually about ten actors who owned shares
in the acting company; Shakespeare's company grew from
eight to twelve. As sharers, these men were the core of the
 IN GOOD company: the sixteenth-century acting companies 1 27

company, splitting both the costs and profits of putting

on a play. They were the ones who made all the decisions
about how to spend the company's money. Will Juliet be
able to wear one of Cleopatra's old gowns? Can we afford
to hire a third musician for the wedding celebration in As
You Like It? How can we possibly produce Macbeth with-
out buying more daggers and replacing the armor? The
new stagehand keeps putting Claudius' throne of state in
the wrong place onstage —
should we hire another?
But they shared the problems, they shared the profits,
if

too. More than one actor-sharer in a company —

Shakespeare
—
among them became prosperous middle-class citizens
as a result. Because a sharer owned his shares, he was
free to do whatever he wanted with them —
sell them, buy
them, or bequeath them to someone else, just as he pleased.
When the famous clown Will Kcmpe left the Lord Shake-
speare's company, he gave his share in the company to
Shakespeare and two other actor-sharers to split three
ways; Richard Burbage left his percentage to his wife when
he died.
The next leyel in the company's organization was oc-
cupied by the hired men, who usually worked on a two-
year contract for weekly wages. In addition there were the
musicians who provided instrumental music for the songs
that were so essential to the play; the tire-men who helped
in the tiring-house, or dressing room; and the gatherers,
—
or ticket-takers often old widows. There were also sev-
eral stagehands to do the menial labor and plenty of extras
around to fill in the stage-crowd for a procession or wed-
ding or parade during the play.
But probably the most important of all these employees
was the book-keeper, whose responsibilities were endless.
This man attended to all the details relating to the play
itself, both the written and the stage versions. He took
care of getting the necessar\- license from the Revels Of-
fice, insured that the play was revised and altered as di-
rected by this office, copied out the parts of the play, and
delegated his many responsibilities among the various
stagehands under his command. Once the play was in
performance, he worked as the prompter and also as gen-
eral stage manager, making sure everything ran smoothly
during the show.
None of these theatrical employees, not even the book-
128 SHAKESPEARE alive!

keeper, could expect to make a fortune from his job in the

theater; most survived on several (six to ten) shillings a
week. Although this doesn't sound like much, compared
to what middle-level w^orkers (or journeymen) in other
trades were earning, theater employees were at the top of
the market.
Next in rank to the sharers and the hired men were
the trainees, young boys who received their theatrical ed-
ucation at the hands of the more experienced adult actors
in the company. These boys joined the company between
the ages of ten and thirteen, agreeing to serve appren-
ticeships of at least seven years. A trainee's curriculum
included speech, movement, music, fencing, dancing, and
—
singing everything he needed to prepare him for the ri-
gors of performance in a public theater.
Boys in adult companies such as the Lord Chamber-
lain's Men played the women's roles, since a government
statute as well as social norms of seemliness and modesty
would keep women off the supposedly lewd and unchaste
English stage until 1660. This is why Cleopatra fears that
her sublime dignity will be degraded and ridiculed in the
theater: "I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my
greatness I' the posture of a whore." It was a given that
all the women's roles would go to the boys —
anything else
was inconceivable. But in other countries it was quite
different. An Englishman traveling in Italy in 1608 re-
corded his surprise: "Here I observed certain things that
I never saw before. For I saw women act, a thing that I

never saw before. .

."
.

These young boys had to be spirited and skilled per-

formers, for they were the ones who played Juliet, Viola,
—
Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Ophelia as well as servant
girls, nurses, old crones, and royal women of all ages,
including queens. Those who made the cut were even-
tually elevated to hired men (perhaps after their voices
changed!) and then possibly to sharer status. As appren-
tices they were paid even less than the hired men, perhaps
only two or three shillings a week, but it was an excellent
education for those willing to work hard.
The role of the theater manager, or the "house-keeper,"
varied from company to company. Sometimes he was a
part of the company itself, and its best interests coin-
cided with his. Or he might be a separate agent who ruled
 IN GOOD company: the sixteenth-century acting companies 129

the company's affairs with a firm, even dictatorial hand,

taking care of their needs —
furnishing props, buying cos-
tumes, lending money to the actors or playwrights, fi-
nancing the company's productions, and even building a
new theater.
One of the most famous and powerful of these house-
keepers was the impresario Philip Henslowe, for many
years the manager of the Lord Admiral's Men, chief rivals
of Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
Although this shrewd businessman's policies were prob-
ably similar to those of other companies, Henslowe seems
to have ruled the Admiral's Men with an especially iron
hand. He demanded deposits from actors in order to hold
them to their agreements to remain with the company.
He also fined actors for missing or being drunk during
rehearsals and performances.
Even a company with a hard-nosed autocrat such as
Henslowe for a manager was by and large a collective
enterprise. Decisions about everything from distributing
the roles to dividing the profits were made jointly by the
shareholders and carried out by them, their employees,
and their apprentices, necessitating a good deal of co-
operation.

Double the Fun

But if all had to be harmony within a company, things

were slightly less peaceful in relationships between com-
panies. As theaters grew up north and south of London,
and as companies grew more established and well known
among the general public, the competition for that pub-
He's money grew heated. Given that London's population
was that of a small modem city, around 160,000, the ri-
valries must have been fierce. It was a fairly intimate kind
of competition; most of the actors knew each other, for
theater circles were relatively small. The competition didn't
escape the notice of a German tourist: "Daily, at two in
the afternoon, London has two, sometimes three plays
running in different places, competing with each other,
and those which play best obtain most spectators."
 —
130 SHAKESPEARE alive!

In fact, throughout the late 1590s and into the early

1600s, the London stage was dominated, even controlled,
by two major companies, the Lord Chamberlain's Men
and the Lord Admiral's Men, because of a decree of the
Privy Council in 1598 to limit the chaos of the burgeoning
theater scene.
The Lord Admiral's Men had sailed into prominence
when the Queen's Men declined in popularity in the 1 580s.
By the early nineties, with their lineup of actors and their
hot-shot manager Henslowe, they were a hard act to fol-
low. Edward Alleyn, the company's principal actor (and
Henslowe's son-in-law) would be considered a superstar
by later standards, for he was the most famous actor of
his day. How could people forget such a deep voice, a
striking presence, and a height that was estimated at seven
feet!
But however popular Alleyn and the Admiral's plays
might have been, by the end of the nineties, everyone who
knew anything about the theater knew that the up-and-
coming new company was the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
These actors, who had spent much of the eighties touring
the provinces, now became increasingly popular with the
London public. The repertoire of plays the Chamberlain's
Men performed was a varied one, ranging from Shake-
speare's masterpieces to light comedies, plays that taught
a moral lesson (such as Tlie Miseries of Enforced Marriage)
to experimental new plays, and anything else that struck
their fancy. Their successes were crowned and their num-
ber-one position confirmed when, after the death of Queen
Elizabeth in 1603, the new King James promoted the "Lord
Chamberlain's Men" to the "King's Men," while the "Ad-
miral's Men" were elevated only to the level of "Prince
Henry's Men."
Within the theater world the reputation of the Cham-
berlain's Men also rose steadily throughout the 1 590s. They
"tiaS^ more and better theaters than any other company;
their roster boasted the best plavwrights; they promoted
from within their ranks; they were, in short, th e company
to be associated with that is, for anyone lucky enough
to tind his way m. After all, there were no more than eight
or ten leading actors in the company, and only a handful
of hired men and boy actors. Openings didn't come up
 IN GOOD company: THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ACTING COMPANIES 1 3 1

very often: in ten years, the Lord Chamberlain's Men had

to replace only two actors —
both times because someone
had died.
However, life wasn't always as easy as it seemed over
at the Theatre, where the Lord Chamberlain's Men were
based. The biggest threat to their sunival came in the late
1590s, when the lease that Burbage had taken on the The-
atre's land was about to expire. The landlord decided to
be completely unreasonable about renewing it, insisting
on a rent increase and threatening to tear down the The-
atre to build "something better" on his land. In the middle
of the negotiations, Burbage died and the lease passed to
his sons, Richard and Cuthbert.
Exploited by their landlord, blocked in their attempt
to move to an indoor theater, and losing ground to their
competitors, the Chamberlain's Men had to do some fast
footwork. Acting aggressively, if somewhat illegally, they
won the day by staging a bold and daring coup.
Just after Christmas in 1598, while the landlord was
away at his country house, a handful of actors trudged
silently but resolutely across Finsbur>' Fields sometime
around midnight. Reaching the Theatre, they pulled out
their tools, rolled up their shirtsleeves, and proceeded to
pull it down, timber by timber, under the direction of the
carpenter and architect Peter Street. As the landlord later
described it in his (unsuccessful) lawsuit against the ac-
tors, they were "then and there pulling, breaking, and
throwing down the said theater in verv* outrageous, vio-
lent, and riotous sort."
A few days later, the actors transported the contra-
band wood south across the river to a plot of land on
the Bankside, 150 yards south of the Thames. A con-
tract was signed giving half of the lease to the Burbage
brothers and the other half to five of the actors in the
company. No doubt the sour experience with the land-
lord of the Theatre had taught these men the value of
directing their own fate, and they made sure to maintain
control. Instead of leasing the Globe from a separate theater
owner/manager, the actors in the Lord Chamberlain's men
owned the lease themselves. This was unique in London;
no other theater company actually owned the building it
performed in.
 !

1 32 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

Global Dimensions

Within seven or eight months, the Globe Theatre was

finished —
a stage for the Chamberlain's Men and for Wil-
liam Shakespeare. The move to the Globe was the begin-
ning of a new era of prosperity for the company. The
—
location of the new theater was ideal just south of the
riverbank, a few hundred feet from the competing Lord
Admiral's Men at the Rose, and not far from the bear-
baiting arena.
Several of the Globe's actors became nationally fa-
mous. Richard Burbage made his name as an actor who
portrayed emotion realistically and convincingly. Some of
Shakespeare's great tragic characters were probably writ-
ten for him —
including Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello.
Will Kempe was the company's knockabout comedian,
most famous for his ability to dance jigs. In fact, he had
such a love of dancing that when he left the company, he
did a morris-dance (an English folk-dance) all the way from
London to the city of Norwich, a distance of over one
—
hundred miles and took only nine days to do it! Kempe's
successor was Robert Armin, a more sophisticated, less
rough-and-tumble character who probably played Feste
in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear. And, of course,
the Lord Chamberlain's Men had the most popular play-
—
wright in England William Shakespeare.
Not everyone in the neighborhood was rapturous over
the success of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, The Lord
Admiral's Men had been at the Rose for over a decade
before their archrivals moved in practicalh' down the street.
The Rose's structure was already showing signs of aging,
and the damp marshy ground it stood on often got mucky
and impassable in the rain. And so it wasn't long before
the Admiral's Men moved back across the Thames to the
north. They hired the man who had been the Globe's builder/
carpenter, Peter Street, to build a new theater, along the
lines of the Globe, in Finsbury. They called it, perhaps
with hope for the future, the Fortune. And so the rivalry
continued.
Although these two companies held the legal monopoly
on theatrical activity in London, in practice their dual
 IN GOOD COMPANT: THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ACTING COMPANIES 1 33

position didn't go unchallenged. Toward the early 1600s,

there was a revival of the bov-onlv companies which had
,

been popular for a while in the 1570s and 1580s. These

groups of little boys had started decades before as choir-
boys associated with particular chapels (Saint Paul's and
the Chapel Royal), under the direction of a choirmaster.
Gradually, they began giving dramatic performances for
the public and discovered that there was quite a market
for the witty and satirical plays which were their specialty.
Soon they were as professional as any other company,
sometimes managed by greedy adults motivated purely by
profit.
Having sunived the growing pains of the London thea-
ter world, the boy companies enjoyed a revival in the late
years of the sixteenth centun. —
much to the dismay of
their adult rivals. Audiences were drawn to the combi-
nation of the boys' small, elflike appearance and their child-
ish voices speaking the scurrilous lines of plays that were
written especially for them. Rosencrantz's description of
them in Hamlet suggests the general attitude toward the
boys among the older professional companies of the time:
"there is, sir, an aerie of children, little eyases [young hawks
in training], that en- out on the top of question and are
most tyrannically clapped for 't. These are now the fash-
ion, and so berattle the common stages — so they call
—
them that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose quills
and dare scarce come thither."
Meanwhile, various provincial companies were am-
bling in and out of London. From time to time, the Earl
of Derby's Men, the Earl of Hertford's Men, and other
companies from England's rural counties arrived, gave a
few performances, and went back where they came from.
They posed no serious threat to the major companies.
The real trustbusters, who actually did manage to break
the double monopoly in the se\enteenth centur\', were the
Earl of Worcester's Men. Eventually setting up at the Red
Bull, another theater north of London, they car\ed out a
niche for themselves with a repertor\' of English "domes-
tic" comedies (offering lots of local humor) and swash-
buckling adventure plays.
Ultimately, then, all three companies — the Chamber-
lain's Men at the Globe, the Admiral's Men at the Fortune,
—
and Worcester's Men at the Red Bull were competing for
 —
1 34 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE 1

audiences. In order to stay afloat in this cutthroat environ-

ment, the companies had to provide their audiences with
—
something new all the time which meant an extremely
varied and ever-changing schedule of plays. In a typical
— —
season indoor, outdoor, and touring a company might
play six days a week, forty-nine weeks a year, and perform
around forty plays, over half of them brand-new.
To make things busier still, the same play was never
performed two afternoons in a row! In two weeks a single
company might typically put on eleven performances of
ten different plays — some new ones, some old ones
without batting an eye. The scheduling of plays was ran-
dom, so that an actor might arrive at the theater to find
that instead of playing Macbeth he had to brush up on
the part of Orsino in Twelfth Night — a role he hadn't played
in six months. The acting company of "rude mechanicals"
in A Midsummer Night's Dream operates on just such a
schedule: their manager. Quince, says, "But, masters, here
are your parts. And I am to entreat you, request you, and
desire to con [learn] them by tomorrow night; and
you
meet me
in the palace wood, a mile without the town, by
moonlight. There will we rehearse."
New plays were introduced frequently, usually about
every two weeks. Old plays could be revived on extremely
short notice. Most plays ran for seven or eight perfor-
mances, spread out over the season. A "long run" was
defined as any play that was performed more than twenty
times over a period of years.
It wasn't as if this hectic pace ever eased up. The com-
panies played practically year-round, with some variation
according to the season. There was usually a break dur-
ing the Church season of Lent; a summer recess (during
plague years) usually from July to September or October;
and a slowdown in the schedule during the Christmas
season.
A company that could maintain this frantic schedule
and still produce the season's hits would be invited to
perform at Court for the queen (or king, after 1603). The
performance at Court, usually sometime over Christmas,
was a regular feature of a successful company's season
and an honor that all the companies prized. In addition.
Court performances were crucial to keeping the public
theaters open for the rest of the year. City authorities were
 IN GOOD COMPAVi THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ACTING COMPANIES 135
:

frequently reminded that the actors were "rehearsing" for

the queen.
In the summertime, when the plague descended upon
London and closed the theaters, the companies often took
to the road again, recapturing the days of the strolling
players. They drummed up audiences just as their wan-
dering predecessors had done, going from Dover to Can-
terbury, Oxford to Bath, and from York to Norwich.
But now that the actors had tasted the sweets of a
permanent establishment, they returned only reluctantly
to the subsistence fare of a touring company: half the
usual number of actors, pay cuts, fewer props, and playing
conditions that (unlike the nice roomy theaters in London)
were unpredictable and often not ver\- good. Touring was
far less profitable than performing in the public theaters;
it was an act of necessity, not choice.

Occasionally some of the actors in a company went

farther afield, traveling across the English Channel to Eu-
rope. Germany and the Netherlands were the most pop-
ular touring grounds for these adventurous actors. They
usually carried letters of introduction from their noble
patron, asking foreign officials "to show and afford them
ever\- favor in your countries and jurisdictions," and not
to keep them "from practicing their said profession ever\'-
where." "Said profession" covered more than just acting;
it included music and g\'mnastics as well.

Wherever they went in Europe and however makeshift

their performances, the English actors were given a warm
reception. Despite the fact that most of the foreigners didn't
understand a word of English, they loved watching the
actors' gestures and actions. One English traveler re-
ported, "I have seen some straggling broken companies
that passed into Netherland and Germany, followed by
the people from one town to another, though they under-
stood not their words, only to see their action."
Still, the actors knew that the real core of the theater
world in sixteenth-century England was to be found not
on the Continent, not in the provinces, but in the city of
London. That was where the permanent playhouses were;
it was where the investors and financial backers were and

where the audiences were. The heart of theatrical activity

in London was, of course, the company of professional
actors.
 CHAPTER 9

Getting Their
Acts Together:
Playwright and
Audience

The acting companies weren't the only "players" on the

sixteenth-century theater team; two other groups were just
as important — the playwright (or the "poet," as he was
then known) and the audience.

Wielding the Pen

No MATTER HOW beautiful and spacious the public thea-

ters,and no matter how well-organized and efficiently-
run the companies, if the playwright wrote a dud play,
the audiences would stay away. Of course a playwright of
any era has to think about his audiences. But unlike a
modern playwright, a sixteenth-century "poet" often
couldn't even call a play his own; many plays in Shake-
speare's day were written by several people in collabora-
tion, each individual writing one act. One playwright
boasted that he had had a hand in two hundred twenty
plays; others tallied up the more modest sums of fifty or
sixty-nine plays. Scattered throughout Henslowe's busi-
ness records are such entries as "Lent unto Thomas Down-
ton the 29 of May 1602 to pay Thomas Dekker, Drayton,
Middleton, and Webster and Munday in full payment for
their play called Two Shapes, the sum of £3."
. . .
 GETTING THEIR ACTS TOGETHER: PLAYWRIGHT AND AUDIENCE 1 37

Nor was playwriting a very reputable line of work as ,

it is^ow. Like a modem Hollywood screenwriter, once a

poet sold his play to an acting company, he had almost
no control over what happened to the manuscript as it
was being prepared for performance; his wishes were rarely
taken into account. Because plays weren't often published
in printed form, dramatists didn't enjoy the prestige of
seeing their works sold as books. And playwrights were
almost universally looked down upon by other kinds of
writers as cheap, low-grade drudges.
As commercial theater boomed in the 1 580s and 1 590s,
playwrights became more important as suppliers of the
— —
goods wit and entertainment that were being pack-
aged and sold. Just as television introduces programming
— —
changes every season or mid-season the theater of the
late sixteenth century required a new play every two weeks;
there was a constant and enormous demand for fresh drama
to satisfy the voracious appetite of companies and audi-
ences.
This quick turnover of plays was part of what gave
playwrights their reputation as hacks. A playwright couldn't
afford to be painstaking or to spend months carving out
a jewel of a play. It was a question of getting the top
ratings; the best play was the one that brought in the
biggest audiences, not necessarily the one that would earn
the praises of later critics as a work of literary genius.
If there was a great demand for hack-writing, there
was an even greater supply of hack-writers, many of whom
were well-educated graduates of English schools and uni-
versities. London was full of young men hoping to make
a living off of their wit (a good living wasn't always easy
to find in those days, even for college graduates). This
surplus of aspiring playwrights meant that it was definitely
a buyers' market: the acting companies were the ones with
the money and the job opportunities, and the playwrights
were generally at their mercy.
There were two ways for a playwright to enter that
risky market: as an i ndependent free-lan cer or under con-
tract to an acting company A free-lancer peddled his plays
.

to any and all buyers for a fixed amount of money. If a

company accepted his play after hearing a first draft or a
plot outline, often in a local bar, he would be paid a series
of advances until he finished it. But even after signing for
138 SHAKESPEARE alive!

a play and paying sums in advance, the company resented

the right to reject the final version, in which case the luck-
less plav'wright had to pay back all the advances. The going
rate for a play, about six pounds, was equivalent to more
than four months of a laborer's salary; it was also the
amount a company might spend on a single costume.
The alternative to free-lancing was to work as an "or-
dinary poet," a playwright under exclusive contract to an
acting company. In this capacity a playwTight would sign
a contract promising to write two or three plays a year
over two or three years for that company only, and no
other, in return for a weekly salary (possibly), a fixed
fee per play, and the usual benefit performance (box office
receipts from one performance of his work). This was the
kind of arrangement Shakespeare probably had with the
Lord Chamberlain's (later King's) Men at the Globe. Of
course, even if the playwright was bound to write for one
company only, that company wasn't bound to buy only
his plays and no one else's; the actors were constantly on
the lookout for new pieces to perform.
But even with contractual w^ork, the pla\^vright couldn't
just sit down and chum out plays thoughtlessly. He lived
and worked in a theater that had certain built-in require-
ments, many of which influenced his playwriting before he
even took up his quill and parchment to begin. In the first
place, a sixteenth-century dramatist always had th e talents
^gii£lbi^^^Ct<rri«^tJr^,of the rnmpafiy' s actors in the back of
bis mind. He didn't have to write roles for superstar actors
who would be flown in from Los Angeles and New York
City. TJie casl£Qxi-aqvpla>LJ^^^£alwa>^^ — the per-
manentlhembers anH^employees ofme acting company
— and unless he wrote a play with roles that they could
perform, it would never see the light of day. Shakespeare
was fortunate to be writing for a company of extremely
talented actors.
The playwright also had to compensate fo rminimal
_sceii£ryand the JacLj^f a lighting syste[Ti Shakespeare
transformed this limitation into an advantage, writing some
of his most beautiful poetry to paint the set. Has there
ever been anything to equal Romeo's evocative heralding
of the dawn? "Look, love," he says to Juliet, "what envious
streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east. Night's
 GETTING THEIR ACTS TOGETHER: PLA'J'WRIGHT AND AUDIENCE 1 39

candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on

the misty mountain tops."
The pla\"^vright's stagecraft was also influenced by the
n ecessity of role-doubUng He had to construct the play
.

carehiUy so that two characters being played by the same

actor would never have to be onstage at the same time. A
plav^^vright who insisted that his play was a sacred and
untouchable work of art wouldn't last long in the six-
teenth-centurv' theater.
The contracted poet did much more than provide his
company with two or three plays a year. It was a common
practice for a company to dig up old plays, brush them
off and dress them in up-to-date material, and perform
—
them again and the pla\avright was expected to write
new scenes or make alterations in these revival plays. He
also had to compose prologySi^and epilogues to be stuck
on to plays that were either being adapted for Court per-
formance or being revived after a period of neglect. And
finally, the pla\A\Tight wrote lyrics for songs in the plays;
the Hecate songs in Acts 2 and 4 oi Macbeth are an example
of this.
But the one thing that was definitely not part of a
playw^right's job description was preparing his plays for
publication. Acting companies were violently againsjLthe
)rinting of plays. In an age when there were no copyrigKt
faws, publishmg a popular play meant that rival acting

companies could get hold of it and perform it without the

fear of legal consequences. An acting company was usually
only willing to let a play go to the printer if it was hope-
lessly out-of-date (and unrevivable) or a total failure. One
playwright excused the fact that his plays hadn't been
printed by blaming his acting company, "who think it
against their peculiar profit to have them come in print."
Most staff plavAvrights didn't seem to be bothered by
this. Shakespeare's body of plays wasn't published in any
permanent form until seven years after he had died. The
man who took over Shakespeare's position as ordinary
poet for the King's Men, John Fletcher, was equally in-
different. One plav-wright declared that "it was never any
great ambition in me, to be in this kind voluminously
read." This same pla\"wright had also lost several of his
plays because he wrote them on scraps of paper in local
140 SHAKESPEARE alive!

—
eating houses or taverns which says a lot about how
seriously he took the whole business.
To most people within the theater business, it seemed
pointless to presence such a transient form of entertain-
ment as the stage play. A play wasn't a literar\' text, but a
—
passing event splendid and quickly-vanishing.
The general reading public felt the same way. A clear
and unquestioned distinction was made between "real"
literature and mere stage-plays, which were on a par with
broadside ballads and other forms of cheap printed ma-
terial. As he was setting up the famous Bodleian Librars'
at Oxford, the nobleman Sir Thomas Bodley excluded plays
from his grand collection. Classifying them with almanacs
and other riffraff, he called them "baggage books," of "very
unworthy matters" not fit for his shelves.
For a public inclined to judge a book by its cover, plays
were bound to be left off library shelves. Plays in Shake-
speare's time were produced in cheap single editions called
quartos (pieces of paper folded twice, with no binding),
sharing bookstall space with equally cheap items such as
joke books and penny-pamphlets. Like newspapers or comic
books today, their ver\' appearance suggested that they
were intended to be read and discarded. The more sub-
stantial folio format, much bigger and formidably per-
manent-looking, was reserved for the ancient classics,
modern sermons, ponderous geographies, or books by En-
gland's rulers— the types of writing that were considered
worthwhile additions to England's stock of literature.
It was the upgradmgjjf plays n the hootf market that
i

began t o softenTKe an ti -playwright prejudic e. This process

began in 1616 with the publication of the Works of Ben
Jonson (a colleague and rival of Shakespeare) in a Folio
edition. It was the first time a playwright had ever given
his plays the grandiose title of "works" and the first time
plays had been published in folio. This edition, and the
Folio publication of Shakespeare's plays seven years later,
did much to improve the inferior status of the playwrights
and their plays. Folios proclaimed a new and improved
standing for the playwright as a serious writer worthy of
respect. With the packaging and labeling of plays as real
books, professional status for the playwright was on its
way.
 GETTING THEIR ACTS TOGETHER: PLAYWRIGHT AND AUDIENCE 141

With Patient Ears

Both in the old-fashioned morality and mysteiy plays of

the Middle Ages and in the popular infonnal plays put on
by the traveling actors in the early 1500s, audiences were
always being pulled into the play. ^Charact ers addrgssej
m
^hern fro the sta ge, made themjhejutt^fjok^wal^gd^
mraugtrtneirmititetr^r^^
)ant£nrTfie^e igTlTiancer i

"AT'tfama became professionalized in the 1580s and

1590s, the audience began to play an even greater role,
not merely in the performance of a given play but in the
sur\^ivaland success of the theater. An acting company's
success depended on attracting audiences to a play and
pleasing them once they'd gotten there. The people of Lon-
don could make or break the fate of a play by attending
or staying away; because they held the power of the pen-
nies, they had an indirect voice in what kinds of plays
were written and performed in the public theaters. A play
that was unpopular with an audience might close after a
few performances.
Who was this all-important audience? The other play-
ers in the theatrical enterprise spanned t he sQcial r];^5;«;p^-
in general, the actors were from the lower artisan classes;
the theater managers, and some of the plav-wrights, were
from the middle classes; and the patrons and officials were
from the noble, upper classes. Which one of these cate-
gories did the audience fit into?
The answer is, all of them. Thanks to the cheap ad-
mission fee, no one was ext^luded from the thpnter.Fvpn
the humblest alehouse tapster (like Francis the drawer in
Henry IV Part I) could walk through the door of that public
theater for a single penny. Those who were concerned with
greater comfort or eager for greater prestige could shell
out another penny or two to sit in the gallery section,
sometimes on cushioned seats.
The basic entry fee of a penny was within the reach of
most people. The average worker brought home about
seven shillings a week; a shilling was equal to twelve pen-
nies; and so seeing a play cost one eighty-fourth of the
142 SHAKESPEARE alive!

average person's weekly earnings. To get an idea of the

relative prices, consider that today a $6 movie ticket is
one eighty-fourth of $500 in weekly earnings ($26,000 a
year), and a Broadway ticket would require nearly $4000
a week ($208,000 a year) to achieve the same ratio!
Theater wasn't just inexpensive relative to today's prices;
even in the sixteenth century, it was the cheapest way to__
have fun, aside from going to the bearbaiting. Spending
an attemoon in an alehouse and drinking the standard
quart of ale would set you back four pennies. If you wanted
to try the new fad of smoking tobacco, you could expect
to pay three pennies for a ridiculously small pipe. Gam-
bling was expensive (depending on how good you were);
"whoring," or visiting a brothel, was a minimum of six
pennies; and going out to dinner, a less controversial pas-
time, could cost up to twenty pennies. By these standards,
—
a play in the public theater chock-full of action, spec-
tacle, and adventure — was without a doubt the best bar-
gain in town.
Because plays were so affordable, accessible, and fun,
they drew people from a wide range of social classes>^
Young noblemen studying at the Inns of Court, pros-
perous merchants and traders, well-to-do lawyers and
doctors, grocers and glovemakers and booksellers and
bakers and their families, enthusiastic teenage appren-
tices, poor peddlers, humble household servants, and menial
—
workers all crowded in through the same two doors be-
fore separating to go upstairs to the galleries or straight
through to the yard. As one critic observed, "the common
people which resort to the theaters [are] but an assembly
of tailors, tinkers, cordwainers, sailors, old men, young
."
men, women, boys, girls, and such like. . .

It was very much a democratic gathering remarkably

,

so considering the undemocratic and status-conscious na-

ture of sixteenth-century London. Inside the public thea-
ter, the social distinctions that kept everyone in his or her
place in the real world simply melted away.
It was precisely this aspect of the theater that disturbed
its critics; they feared that young people would begin to
talk back to their elders, or that inferior classes would rise
up against their betters as a result of their brief but heady
experience of democracy in the public theaters. For where
democracy flourished, these people reasoned, could danger
 GETTING THEIR ACTS TOGETHER: PLAYWRIGHT AND AUDIENCE 143

be far behind? Theaters were ideal places, in the eyes of

such fearful observers, for "contrivers of treason and other
idle and dangerous persons to meet together."
Of course the size of the crowds that went to the theater
was nothing like the huge numbers that fill the Super
Bowl or Madison Square Garden today. The Globe and
the Rose probably drew about 1250 people apiece daily,
about half of their capacity. The audiences were always
bigger for the first performance of a new play and on the
public holidays of Easter, Christmas, and Whitsunday;
indeed, the actors always looked forward to the larger and
more celebratory holiday crowds. The number of regular
playgoers, however, hovered somewhere between twelve
percent and twenty percent of London's population far —
fewer people than go to the movies today. In a six-day
performance week in the late 1590s, probably around fif-
teen thousand people went to plays put on by two or three
main acting companies.
The fact was that rnost Londoners didn go to plavs at
't

the public theaters. There were several reasons for this!

"One ot them was the .hour of theperfoiTDances usually—
two o'clock. Free time^vas'hard For^orking people to
find, and it was hardly possible to take off from work in
the middle of an afternoon for a two-hour performance a
mile away through the fields or all the w^ay across the river.
—
This is why holiday crowds were so big holidays gave
workers the leisure time to go. There was also a sizable
contingent o f Puritans who stayed away because of their
religious conviction that a play was not a place for upright
citizens but a nasty sewer "whereunto all the filth doth
run." Some people may not have had the inclination; and,
of course, there were the few who didn't have the means
to afford even the penny a Hmi «;<;inn
But if those who came to the theaters represented a
minority, it was certainly a vocal minority. Their behavior
was much more enthusiastic, alive, and responsive than
that of the average member of a modem audience; Shake-
speare's audience was a boisterous crowd.
While in the theater, one had fo keep^an eye out for
the pickpockets in the audience and maintain a safe dis-
tance from the exuberant apprentices. Fistfights only oc-
casionally broke out; one entire audience erupted into an
angry riot when they realized that they had been duped
144 SHAKESPEARE alive!

by a man who had promised them—a nonexistent play and

then made with their money "the common people
off
when they saw themselves deluded, revenged themselves
upon the hangings, curtains, stools, walls, and whatsoever
came in their way very outrageously," one reporter com-
mented.
Barring understandable reactions like this, things rarely
got so out of hand. After all, Elizabethans had paid good
money to get in to see the play, and it was unlikely that
they would spend their time talking to each other, fighting,
or ignoring it. Of course audiences were far more used to
listening to the spoken word than we are today. Years of
relying on word of mouth as the only source of news,
—
information, and entertainment whether it was village
gossip, preachers' sermons, or fireside stories —
made them
much more sensitive to the importance of good listening.
However, just to insure their cooperation, the actors
would often begin the play with a prologue begging the
audience to be silent. The Prologue to Henry V bids them
"gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play." The Chorus to
Romeo and Juliet tells the audience that "if you with pa-
tient ears attend [listen], What here shall miss, our toil
shall strive to mend."
The audience would leave no doubt in anyone's mind
as to their reactions to the performance. When they liked
what they saw, they laughed loudly and long; as a con-
temporary observer noted, "In the theaters they generally
take up a wonderful laughter, and shout altogether with
one voice, when they see some notable cozenage [decep-
tion] practiced." And they hissed and booed unabashedly
if the play didn't please them. Some spectators got so

involved with what was happening onstage that they prac-

tically participated themselves; one observer reported the
perturbed members of an audience "mounting the stage,
and making more bloody catastrophe amongst themselves
than the players did."
In the absence of any newspapers or magazines, th(
audience members were the theater critic s, for better oi
worse. Plays wefe talked about m
tavems'over a quart ot
ale, on the walk across London Bridge from the Globe,
during the work day, and in the theaters themselves. De-
spite what Hamlet says jokingly about the "groundlings,
who for the most part are capable of nothing but inex-
 GETTING THEIR ACTS TOGETHER: PLAYWRIGHT AND AUDIENCE 1 45

plicable dumb shows and noise," Shakespeare understood

Rill well that he was writing for a literate and perceptive
audience who had their wits about them. In a big bustling
city like London you couldn't survive unless you were alert
and streetwise.
Different theaters attracted different audiences. The
Red Bull, where Worcester's Men played, drew the rowdies
and lovers of spectacles, noise, and clowning around. An
indoor theater like Blackfriars, within the city walls, at-
tracted a more select clientele.
But the Globe drew the most diverse crowd, a patch-
work assembled from all occupations, ages, and social
classes. People from many different backgrounds came to
see and enjoy the plays of Shakespeare; for two or three
magical hours, their workaday divisions were forgotten.
Without such an audience, Shakespeare would have
had no one to write for, the actors would have had no one
—
to act for and the plays would have ended up on some-
one's bookshelf.
 CHAPTER 10

From Page To
Stage: Producing
A Play in the
Sixteenth
Century
If you could somehow watch a new play being produced
in the late decades of the sixteenth centurv', from the very
first step all the way through an afternoon's performance
in one of the popular outdoor theaters, you would prob-
ably be baffled by some unfamiliar things but also surprised
at how much you actually recognized.
Imagine an aspiring sixteenth-century playwright read-
ing his recent play, or an outline of it, to an acting com-
pany one afternoon after their two o'clock performance.
He waits anxiously as the actors finish their quarts of ale,
put down their mugs, and deliver their verdict. If they like
it, they will buy it right then and there, paying the author

six or seven pounds for his effort. If they like some of what
they see but aren't completely enamored of it all, they
might advance him part of the total payment and suggest
some revisions for him to think about as he finishes the
play. And of course they might also reject it flat out, telling
him to try again when he's got something that's worth
their time.
Once the playwright has finished the first draft and
delivered his "foul papers" (the messy, blotted parchment
he's written the play on) to the company, the company
scribe makes the "fair copy" (which means that it's legi-
ble!). It is sent straightaway to the Revels Office to be
approved and stamped by the Master of Revels. This office,
which has been in existence for several decades, is the
 FROM PAGE TO STAGE: PRODUCING A PLAY 147

single biggest hurdle a company has to negotiate in the

process of putting on a play. Originally set up to supervise,
choose, and organize all entertainment performed for En-
gland's monarch at Court, by the 1580s it has become the
extremely powerful department through which govern-
ment regulation (a nice word for censorship) of all dra-
matic activities is carried out. Not only does the Master
of Revels have the sole authority to license plays and thea-
ters (the average fee, essentially a tax, is between five and
ten shillings), and to enforce the closing of the theaters
during certain Church seasons or in the time of plague
epidemics, but he is also the person responsible for cen-
soring unsuitable materials from all plays. In 1589 he was
given permission (with several other high-placed officials)
to inspect play manuscripts and "strike out such part and
matters as they shall find unfit and undecent to be handled
in plays, both for divinity and state." Anything thought to
undermine the orthodoxy of the Church ("divinity") or the
governing of the commonwealth ("state") is off-limits to
dramatists.
Indeed, things get worse early in the reign of King
James, when onstage profanity is decreed illegal and pun-
ishable. The act of 1606 "to Restrain Abuses of Players"
prohibits actors from jokingly or irreverently using the
names of God, Jesus, or the Holy Ghost; playwrights
are sent scurrying to revise "Good God" to "Great Jove"
and "Heaven" to "the heavens." And so Rosalind in As
You Like It swears "By my troth, and in good earnest,
and so God mend me, and by all pretty oaths that are
."
not dangerous. . .

If the Master of Revels receives any play that contains

political criticism of government policies (domestic or for-
eign) or religious criticism of the established Church of
England, he will demand that the company cut out or alter
the seditious or abusive material. The actors disobey his
instructions at their peril. At the very least they will have
to pay a fine of up to ten pounds, but the penalties could
be far worse. The Office of Revels has no qualms about
stopping an illegal performance of an unlicensed play or
closing a theater down for a long period of time, and on
occasion its officials have been known to throw the of-
fending pla>'wright and actors into prison.
Once the Master of Revels has stamped the playbook
148 SHAKESPEARE alive!

with the stamp and sent it back to the company

official
and the play's author has deleted the offending material,
then the playbook goes to the book-keeper, who takes
the heavily-edited, sliced-up, scrawled-on manuscript and
writes each of the parts out on long scrolls —
by hand, of
course. Then the parts are distributed as the company has
decided. For casting, like everything else, is a collective
decision made by the actors. The acting company that
Shakespeare brings to life in A Midsummer Night's Dream
illustrates this perfectly as the players hand out parts for
their upcoming performance. Bottom declares, "Name what
part I am for, and proceed," to which Quince replies "You,
Nick Bottom, are set down for Pyramus." Another player.
Flute, protests that he can't play Thisbe, the woman's part,
because he is growing a beard; Snug makes a special re-
quest for the lion's part, since, he says, he has trouble
memorizing lines but can roar without rehearsal.
Of course, the company uses a lot of common sense
in casting. For example, the role of a youthful and ro-
mantic swain won't be given to a comically ugly actor;
nor will a part that requires a lot of singing be handed to
someone who can't carry a tune.
While all this is going on, the book-keeperis keeping

a careful watch over the revised and edited playbook; as

the only complete copy of the play, it is extremely valuable.
—
He never lets "the Book" bound in a protective dustcover
or wrapper, with the all-important license from the Master
of Revels stamped inside —
out of his sight and takes great
care to lock it up in one of the trunks or coffers in the
dressing room each afternoon before he leaves. During
the day he carries it around with him, making notes in
the lefthand margin about props, or sound cues, or any
sort of stage directions he'll need to make during the per-
formance. In the margin next to the second act of a new
play, for example, he'll write "Flourish" to remind himself
to be sure the trumpeter blows on cue; for another scene
he'll scrawl "a bed brought in" and look around for the
stagehand who is responsible for the bed.
The book-keeper doubles as the prompter, standing
backstage to remind forgetful actors of their lines. As the
guardian of the playbook offstage and the guardian of
order onstage, he fulfills the functions of both librarian
 FROM PAGE TO STAGE: PRODUCING A PLAY 149

and stage manager. Indeed, a contemporar>- writer urges

the book-keeper to look to his task: "I pray you hold the
book well." Quince demonstrates how a good prompter
operates in A Midsiuyuner Night's Dream. He hisses out
the correct pronunciation and timing to Bottom and then
fumes about his clumsiness: "You speak all your part at
once, cues and all." And he still has the energy to give
another actor a tongue-lashing: "Pyramus, enter: Your cue
ispast."
The text of thepla\', cut and patched, is finally ready.
What happens next? UriTrke their twentieth-centur\' suc-
cessors, these Shakespearean actors don't have time to go
into a long period of rehearsal, crafting ever\ line to per-
fection under the seasoned eye of a director. If anyone
guides the actors through the play, explaining his sense
of how it should be performed, it may be the playwright
himself. A German visitor commented on this practice:
"So far as the actors are concerned they, as I have noticed
in England, are daily instructed, as it were in a school, so
that even the most eminent actors have to allow them-
selves to be taught their plac es by the dramatists, and this
gives life and ornameTTrirraTwefl-w^ritten play. "77 ."
Rehearsal itself isn't really an issue, it appears, simply
because there is never time for it to become one. The
average time span between the day a company receives a
new play from a plavAvright and the first performance is
about two weeks. Whether the company rehearses as the
comical players do in A Midsummer Night's Dream, "by
moonlight" in a forest clearing, where "This green plot
shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring-house,"
or on the stage of the Globe in the remaining hour or two
of daylight after that afternoon's performance, not much
time can be spent working out the details.
But, like evervlhing else in the theater, the few re-
hearsals that do take place are a coUaharalive-xiffQrL Bot-
tom and Quince and Company again provide a delightful
illustration of this. They all agree on the length and form
of a prologue to introduce their play. They discuss the
possible effects of their presentation on the ladies in the
audience, and they resolve the problems that come up in
the course of the rehearsal by mutual consent. For ex-
ample, when they realize that the play's action requires a
1 50 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

wall, Bottom says, "Some man or other must present [rep-

resent] Wall. And let him have some plaster, or some loam,
or some roughcast about him, to signify wall."
While the actors are running around onstage trying to
pull the play together in two weeks, the stationer or printer
they take their business to is busy printing up playbills to
advertise "A New Play, to be played at the Globe on Bank-
side the Tuesday next." The hired men post these signs all
over town to lure audi ences to their theater. Competition
with the other Torms of popular entertainment is heated
indeed, and a less-than-scrupulous actor might feel per-
fectly within his rights to post his sign on top of an ad for
the bearbaiting at the nearby arena. But this isn't really
necessary, for a new play is guaranteed to draw big crowds,
even if its title and author aren't announced ahead of time.
Everyone is always curious to see what the Lord Cham-
berlain's Men, or the Lord Admiral's Men, have come up
with this time.
Opening day arrives almost before anyone can turn
around. Up goes the company's silken flag on the pole above
the playhouse. Backstage the book-keeper hangs the "plot,"
a big piece of thick paper pasted on cardboard that dangles
from a nail in the tiring-room. It is crucial to a smooth-
running performance, for it contains all the esssential in-
formation about which actor is playing which parts, when
actors enter and exit, what props they should be carrying,
at what point specific sound effects are needed, and other
necessary stage business.
As the actors scan this plot for last-minute reminders,
the audiences flock in. The gatherers, or ticket-takers, make
sure that no one tries to sneak in without paying his penny.
The fruit and nut sellers, having laid in an extra supply
for the bigger and more enthusiastic opening day crowds,
wander about the theater hawking their wares, there is a
general hubbub as apprentices jostle one another to sit
near their friends or an attractive girl, bricklayers hap-
pily rub elbows with perfumed ladies, and jealous play-
wrights stand, quill in hand, ready to borrow a catchy
phrase or two.
It is a pleasure just to glance around the physical build-
ing of the theater, to see the stage, with its sturdy wooden
pillars painted to look like marble; the cover over the stage,
called the "heavens," painted blue and gold to resemble
 FROM PAGE TO STAGE: PRODUCING A PLAY 1 5 1

—
the sky; the straw scattered on the stage floor all in all, a
splendid frame for the stage action.
As the flourish of the trumpet and the beat of the drum
waft out over the heads of the groundlings, the crowd
grows quiet and settles in for "the two hours' traffic of our
stage," as Shakespeare refers to it in his Prologue to Romeo
and Juliet. (It is still a mystery- how a four-hour play like
Hamlet could be played in two hours.) Over that time
there's plenty of action to hold the attention of the most
impatient apprentice. There isjancing and singin g; there
are processions, tournaments,'3 attle s hptrnthalt| pinrj_
, ^

Tots more — all asTun-ot-the-milJ In an K |i7ahpthan theater

as car chases, bed room sc enes, and shoot-outs are in to-
day's adventure movies.
le costumes are a stunning component of the spec-
tacle, c olorhii and lavish, richly embroidered with pearls
and gofden thread, and made of the finest materials. They
are a company's most important possession, and the single
biggest expenditure in the production budget, along with
the playbooks. One theater owner's "Inventorv' of Apparel"
includes one short cloak of black satin, one peach-colored
satin doublet, one blue taffeta suit, and a blue robe with
sleeves. No expense is spared in collecting the most_be^iu-
tiful garments Luckily, most of the costumes actually turn
.

out to be less expensive than they look. Many costumes,

in fact, are cast-offs from rich nobles, bought secondhand
from their sen^ants. As a foreign tourist observes, "It is
the English usage for eminent lords or knights at their
decease to bequeath and leave almost the best of their
clothes to their serving men which it is unseemly for the
latter to wear, so that they offer them then for sale for a
small sum to the actors."
But a good play is more than just a pretty picture; it
requires good acting as well. And the audience at the Globe
sees plenty of that. The actors in Shakespeare's company
are the cream of the crop — talented, versatile entertainers
who combine the legs and lungs of an Olympic athlete,
the vocal chords of a rock star, the quick wit of a stand-
up comic, and the memory of a computer.
The audience listens, rapt, to the actors' stirring deliv-
ery of their lines — in a somewhat more artificial style than
a modem audience might be comfortable with, and at a
decibel level high enough to compete with the cries of the
 !

1 52 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

watermen on the river, the creaking of coach wheels roll-

ing by, and the suburban bustle of Southwark.
But although their speech might be more rhetorical or
formalized, it is lively and natural. We have only to look
at the evidence of Shakespeare's plays to understand that
his actors coul dn't be anything but natu ral a nd-Iife4ike.
And indeed, Shakespeare shows what his conception of
good acting is when he has Hamlet instruct the Players
in the essentials of the art of performing. Hamlet counsels
them to speak nimbly but with feeling, to gesture gently
and to remember above all that the purpose of acting is
— —
and always will be "to hold . the mirror up to nature/'
. .

If the actors have succeeded, time has been suspended

for the afternoon. The sun slants across the English au-
tumn sky as the audience tumbles out of the gates of the
Globe and scatters slowly in different directions. Some
head east across Maiden Lane, planning to take the cheap
route into the city by walking across London Bridge. Those
whose wallets are fatter stroll a few hundred yards north
along Horseshoe Alley to the riverbank of the Thames to
catch a water- taxi back across to London. And some, who
have no more pressing business than enjoying themselves,
and who can afford to see a play and drink a quart of ale
in the same afternoon, adjourn to a nearby tavern. But
wherever they're going, no doubt all would agree that it's
been a fine, fun-f3led afternoon at the Globe.
 —

CHAPTER 11

Sources and
Resources

Shakespeare's Reading List

Pounds of fxesh in Venice; ambitious king-killers in Scot-

land; star-crossed lovers in Verona; daughterly ingratitude
in ancient Britain; whimsical courtships in the Forest of
Arden; sultrv' love and stem politics in ancient Egvpt
Shakespeare's imagination appears to have cornered the
market on exciting, inventive plotmaking. It seems there's
no storv' he hasn't thought of. But how could all of these
intriguing plots and stirring adventures possibly come from
a single brain?
The answer —
is simple they didn't. When it came_to
jDlots,Shakespeare was a borrower, not an inventor. It is
astonishing to realize that not a single one of the stories
in his plays was his own creation. Rather than growing
his plots himself, he plucked them from the plentiful or-
chards of other authors. Some had good English names
like Thomas Lodge, George Whetstone, and Raphael Hol-
inshed, while others hailed from the Continent — Giraldo
Cinthio (Italy), Jorge de Montemayor (Portugal), and
Plautus (ancient Rome).
The list of sources Shakespeare probably used reads
like the roll call of a sixteenth-century United Nations:
French philosophy, Spanish romance, Scottish chronicle,
Italian novella, Greek tragedy, Roman comedy, English
154 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

poetry, and much, much more. Ancient or modem, pro-

saic or poetic, sacred or profane, nothing escaped Shake-
speare's roving eye.
And there was plenty for that roving eye to hght on in
sixteenth-century London, thanks to the happy combi-
nation of the Renaissance zest Jorj earning (which created
hterarv wealth) an'd" the newTiTgh-^chnoIogy of the print^
ingpress (which helped spread it). London in Shake-
speareTdav was absolutely brimming over with things to
read— the massive 3000-page chronicles of England, Scot-
land, and Ireland, compiled by Holinshed and his col-
leagues; adventure stories and exotic tales from Italy,
France, and Spain; hair-raising eyewitness travel accounts
written by daring explorers; pleasant pastoral romances
of prose writers; and scores of translations of foreign works,
past and present.
But of all the books on the market, the ancient Greek
and Latin classics were far and away the Elizabethan fa-
voritesT Recentlv revitalized by the Renaissance, they were
on sale both in their original languages and re-packaged
in popular translations— and Elizabethan readers just
couldn't get enough of them. Arthur Golding's rendering
of Ovid's epic poem The Metamorphoses was a best-seller;
also popular was Plutarch's Lives of Famous Greeks and
Romans, as translated into English by Thomas North. The
names of such long-dead dramatists as Euripides, Plautus,
Terence, and Seneca lived as household words in many
an educated Elizabethan home. Anyone who r nuld re ad
in Shakespeare's day did read, eagerly and avidly— for in
an'agelior^Bleised^Wilh radio or television, reading was
the best way to become educated about the world.
Shakespeare had to read selectively, with a collector's
eye for useful detail; as a busy, highly-pressured play-
vvright, he couldn't afford to do otherwise. And yet
the
range of his reading was remarkably wide. It's mind-bog-
gling to contemplate the number of folio pages Shake-
speare must have thumbed through in a single year, looking
for plots, names, characters, speeches, or whatever the
immediate situation called for.
Yet before we start suspecting Shakespeare of plagia-
rism, we'd better take a look at what everyone else was
doing in the literary world. Although this business of out-
right lifting from other writers' work might seem
dubious
 SOURCES AND RESOURCES 1 55

to US, it wasn't unusual in Shakespeare's time. Without

copyright laws to protect an author's works, the business
oi: writing and pubhshing was truly a "free trade" affair,

and everyone's works were salable commodities. Further-

more, the authors^riginality j ust wasn't an issue; in fact,
they were~^penly~encourage3"To^^
styles and literary- rnoHels, especIallyTDut not exclusively,
rtTe clas^iXfaTone^rTTieupshot of all this was that sixteenth-
century authors and playwrights regularly raided both their
predecessors and their colleagues, without giving it a sec-
ond thought; one contemporary of Shakespeare's boasts
proudly, "I have so written, as I have read."
In his far-flung borrowing, then, Shakespeare was a
product of his times; and yet in this, as in so much else,
he flew high above his contemporaries. Shakespeare's ul-
timate source was the broad ^jpiri^of his age, which he
drew on in his own unique fashion. TThe great literary
works available in the Elizabethan time mingled in his
mind with cheap ballads and penny-pamphlets on sale in
Paul's Churchyard, with tavern jokes, church sermons,
and the constant influx of new information about foreign
lands. All of this jostled up against the phrases and sounds
of the everyday work and play of tanners, alehouse keep-
ers, sailors, merchants, constables, nobles, and foreigners
in London. Shakespeare imbibed the rich Elizabethan at-
mosphere as he walked the streets of London, and it was
this atmosphere that he converted magically into theater.

Hit and Myth

Shakespeare had a stock repertoire of allusions to various
well-known figures from Greek and Roman mythology;
Circe, Cupid, Phaethon, Diana, Orpheus, Hercules, and
Jason were among them. In TJte Comedy of Errors, for
example, the Duke comments on the strange goings-on in
Ephesus: "I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup," re-
ferring to the sorceress who transformed men into beasts.
The fat little love god Cupid, who turned seeing humans
into blind lovers, is another familiar figure, especially in
the comedies. Most of the hundreds of references to him
 !

156 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

are playful, as when Rosalind passionately condemns (in

As You Like It) "that same wicked bastard of Venus that
was begot of thought, conceived of spleen, and bom of
madness, that blind rascally boy that abuses everyone's
eyes because his own are out, let him be judge how deep
I am in love." The precocious boy Phaethon, who fell to
the earth from the sky while trying to drive the chariot
of his father the sun god, was the standard symbol of
— —
misguided or misguiding ambition. In King Henry VI
Part 3, the would-be king, the Duke of York, is compared
to Phaethon: "Now Phaethon hath tumbled from his car
And made an evening at the noontide prick." The Greek
hero Jason was well- known; in The Merchant of Venice,
Gratiano celebrates his and Bassanio's success in wooing
Nerissa and Portia by crowing, "We are the Jasons, we
have won the fleece."
Shakespeare didn't just throw these in to impress the
audience with his knowledge. He used them in appropri-
ate contexts, to illustrate a theme, drive home a point, or
give a deeper meaning to the passage. In The Two Gentle-
men of Verona, the disguised Julia underlines the theme
of her beloved Proteus' treachery when she tells Silvia
about her role in the Pentecostal pageant, where "I did
play a lamentable part: Madam, 'twas Ariadne passioning
For Theseus' perjury and unjust flight," referring to the
desertion of Ariadne by her lover, the hero Theseus.
Shakespeare often used myth s as joke material. Again
Rosalind in As You Like It supplies us with an example,
mocking the notion that men have ever died for love:
"Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though
Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot mid-
summer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash
him in the Hellespont (River) and being taken with the
cramp was drowned ..."
SometimesS hakespe are's characters refer iOA^dlrknown
stories and^leg ends to explairrtheir behavio r to others _Qr
ratfonalize it to iheinselves. linTiel^enyWives of Windsor,
Tor "example. Pistol refuses to carry Falstaffs letter to
Mistress Page by invoking the spirit of an infamous go-
between in the Trojan War: "Shall I Sir Pandarus of Troy
become, And by my side wear steel?" Later in the play,
Falstaff rationalizes his ridiculous disguise as Heme the
 SOURCES AND RESOURCES 157

Hunter by summoning Jove, who often appeared in ani-

mal shapes to woo mortals: "Remember, Jove, thou wast
a bull for thy Europa; love set on thy horns . You were
. .

also, Jupiter, a swan for the love of Leda. O omnipotent

Love!"

Biblical Breezes

The Greek and Roman classics weren't the only ancient

works that appeared on the landscape of Shakespeare's
plays; alongside these pagan works lived a classic of
—
another kind the Bible. All in all, Shakespeare refered
to forty-two books of the Bible and mentioned fifty-five
biblical names. He also had several passages from the
Book of Common Prayer, used in the church services of
his day.
Just as the classics infused the Elizabethan atmo-
sphere, so phrases from the prayer book and biblical sto-
ries yyere_an^intiTnate_pai^ daily life. Remember that
tHiswas an age~when going to church was required by
law and religion played a prominent role in everyday af-
fairs.
Most of Shakespeare's biblical allusions were probably
familiar to his audiences. Although modem audiences often
miss the point of these references or require footnotes in
order to understand them, even the faintest biblical echoes
would have been picked up by the church-going ears of
most Elizabethans. In The Taming of the Shrew, for ex-
ample, when Hortensio exclaims "From all such devils,,
good Lord deliver us!" Shakespeare's audience undoubt-
edly recognized the refrain from the litany in the prayer
book they used each Sunday: "From all evil and mischief,
from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the Devil Good . . .

Lord, deliver us."

Often, as with the classics, Shakespeare twisted^,bib-
lical or religiou^^eJferenc^MQ^sui^^
HSjTile?s'TEference'To'uiese^ickers an^ comes
from the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, "To
keep my hands from picking and stealing." In A Mid-
 !

1 58 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

summer Night's Dream, Shakespeare has Bottom uncon-

sciously distort a verse from 1 Corinthians, "The eye hath
not seen, and the ear hath not heard, neither have entered
into the heart of man ." when he emerges from his dream
. .

to say, "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man
hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue
to conceive, nor his heart to report. ." The humor of . .

these exchanges is too often lost on us today, but these

witty allusions are all examples of how richly Shakespeare
threaded the resonances of contemporary language into
his plays.
Some of Shakespeare's most famous lines are flavored
with biblical verse. Compare Portia's "The quality of mercy
is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath" in The Merchant of Venice with
this verse from Ecclesiastes: "O how fair a thing is mercy
in the time of anguish and trouble? it is like a cloud of
rain that cometh in the time of drought." Petruchio's claim
to his wife in The Taming of the Shrew, which begins "She
is m}^ goods^ my-chattels; she, is_n:^JiQus£,^y Jigusehold
stuff, my field^^myjbarn^ My jhorse, my ox, my ass, my
anything," co mes strai ght from the te nlFcbm mandment,
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house nor his ox, . . .

nor his ass, nor anything that is his."

Ironically, it is Shakespeare's version of these lines rather
than the Bible's that has lingered in the minds of most
people. This is partly because Shakespeare placed them
in the mouths of unforgettable characters in equally un-
forgettable dramatic situations. By bringing them to life
in the theater, he insured that they will live forever, con-
stantly resurrected on the stage.

Shakespeare's Lab

There were many other sources from all over the world
that Shakespeare drew on for his plots, sources repre-
senting scores of different cultures, centuries, genres, and
languages. The Italian Giraldo Cinthio's Hecatommithi, a
collection of prose tales, provided a plot for Othello; the
 —
SOURCES AND RESOURCES 1 59

ideas in the essays of the French philosopher Michel de

Montaigne are represented in Hamlet; and Giovanni Fior-
entino's // Pecorone ("The Dunce") is re-created in TJie
Merchant of Venice.
The variety of this material alone is impressive and has
intrigued professors and scholars for decades. But even
more amazing is what Shakespeare did with his sources.
No matter how dull the materialhe started with, his fin-
ished product was always an exciting, funny, or gripping
drama.
This is because Shakespeare approached his sourc es
not as a scholar but as a _pla\'wngEt AltTiough he had
.

plenty of Tacts at hand, his goal was 'dramatic truth.l Ev-

erything he read, everything his ab^orberll mlrld "took
in, was shaped and molded to the needs of the theater.
The question at the back of his mind as he flipped through
Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Im-
postures, or Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, or Raphael Hol-
inshed's Chronicles, was always the same: what will work
on the stage?
In the process of answering this question, Shakespeare
often took extraordinary' liberties with his sources
changing narnp<;, <;ptting^, a nd centuries rearranging events;
;

compressing or extending tim£;_and_cuT!ing and in venting

characters. He made Iragedy^out-of^biography, cornedv^
out of past ora^_and^as tQraI-comical, historical-pastoral,
tegical-hisloncaQragic al-comical-historical-pastoral" Tas
pQtonius mlglTrlTavesaid) out of evervthing.
To comprehend how amazing his transformations were,
just imagine Romeo and Juliet without the nonstop patter
of the Nurse; As You Like It without Touchstone's wit and
Audrey's country^ simplicity; or Henrys IV Part I without
the fiery prominence of Hotspur. All of these colorful char-
acters were either nonexistent or very minor figures in the
sources Shakespeare borrowed from. From the historian
Raphael Holinshed's brief comment in the story of Rich-
ard II that the Duke of York "communed with the Duke
of Lancaster." Shakespeare fashioned the powerful scene
between York and Bolingbroke in Act 2 oi Richard II. Here,
the plavwright brings family relationships, power games,
—
and conflicting loyalties to a dramatic climax all from a
historian's short reference.
 —
1 60 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

Tragical-Poetical

Imagine Shakespeare coming home at the end of an af-

ternoon after a performance at the Globe and a pint of
beer at the alehouse. He returns with a load of books under
his arm and an idea in his head: to write a tragedy about
young lovers who are done in by forces beyond their con-
trol. Although he's vaguely familiar with Arthur Brooke's
narrative poem on such a couple, The Tragical! History of
Romeiis and Juliet (itself based on a French source), his
friends have told him not to bother reading it, as it's ter-
ribly long and tedious. But Shakespeare sits down and
begins to leaf through it anyway, since he knows from
past experience that ^yery source, no matter how un-
promising it seems, has something- to -offer.
He is quickly dismayed by the moralizing tone of
Brooke's opening remarks, which censure the love of the
unwed couple. For already Shakespeare is completely sym-
pathetic to the plight of Romeo and Juliet. As he makes his
way through more than three thousand lines of sing-song
poetry, he jots down a few of Brooke's meticulous details
—
on upper-class life the feuding, the church customs
knowing that, although they seem dead on the page, they
will revive when he puts them on his stage.
He also realizes that the story Brooke tells is too slow-
paced for his dramatic purposes. Instead of nine months
Shakespeare gives the young lovers four and a half days,
turning the stor\^ into a tragedy of missed opportunities
and crossed purposes. While he's at it, he chops a few
years off Juliet's age, just to heighten the pathos a bit more.
As he continues to flip through the pages, his eye is caught
by Brooke's brief two-line reference to a character called
"Mercutio, A courtier that each where [everywhere! was
highly had in price For he was courteous of his speech
and pleasant of device." "Hmmm .
." muses our poet,
.

"there'? got to be something I can do with him." He thinks

about it awhile, taking a few paces around the room, fi-
nally deciding to turn him into Romeo's witty and fiery
friend and foil. To show early on how the pointless feud
between the families causes the shedding of innocent
blood, he then kills off Mercutio halfway through the play.
 1

SOURCES AND RESOURCES 1 6

He rummages around in his imagination and comes up

with a lovable, talkative, treacherous nurse for Juliet. And
then, seasoning the play with a pinch of sen^ant comedy,
a dash or two of swordfighting, and some of the most
beautiful poetic language ever written, Shakespeare de-
cides that Romeo and Juliet is finally complete. The wooden,
tedious narrative poem has become a powerful, unfor-
gettable tragedy of star-crossed lovers.

Tragical-Historical

Suppose that instead of a tragic love stors-, Shakespeare

is interested in writing a historical play to compliment
the new king of England, James I. He remembers seeing
a storv' about the Scottish nobleman Macbeth in Hol-
inshed's Chronicles his much-used historical source. The
,

plaNAvright has come to rely on Holinshed for his pains-

taking detail, his long and balanced sentences, his simple,
powerful metaphors, and even his moralizing comments
in the margins. In fact, by the end of his career, Shake-
speare will have used Holinshed for almost one quarter
of his plays.
Since James I is reputedly descended from the char-
acter Banquo, who figures prominently in the Macbeth
stor\', Shakespeare now opens
the massive three-volume
folio to volume 2, the History- of Scotland. Immediately he
finds the reference to "Banquo, the Thane of Lochaber, of
whom the House of the Stuarts is descended, the which
by order of lineage hath now for a long time enjoyed the
crown of Scotland even till these our days. ." He reads
. .

with mounting excitement about an encounter that the

victorious Macbeth and Banquo have with "three women
in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of an
elder [ancient] world," knowing that sinister witches will
go over extremely well with his audience. An ambitious
—
wife for Macbeth yes, that will be fine; so far, so good.
Then he arrives at the account of Macbeth's plot to
murder the king, and suddenly evervthing falls apart with
the statement that Macbeth, "communicating his pur-
posed intent with his trusty friends, amongst whom Ban-
162 SHAKESPEARE alive!

quo was the chiefest," killed the king. This last phrase is
troublesome: it simply will not do for an ancestor of King
James to be an accomplice to murder. Shakespeare buries
his head in his hands for a minute and then decides to
read through the rest of the story, just to see what happens.
It is full of great stage material — ambiguous prophecies
from the witches, Macbeth's slaughter of Macduff's wife
and children, and the final dramatic confrontation be-
tween Macbeth and Macduff, which ends with Holinshed's
statement, "he [MacduffJ stepped unto him and slew him
in the place."
All of that will be fine with just a little Shakespearean
retouching. But this business of James's ancestor Banquo
as a conspirator in the murder of the king is sticky. What
can Shakespeare do? Absentmindedly he flicks back through
a few pages of the History of Scotland and begins to read
the story of the nobleman Donwald and his murder of
King Duff. Though Donwald has a grievance against the
king, he is reluctant to kill him and does so because his
ambitious wife eggs him on: "thus being the more kindled
in wrath by the words of his wife, [he] determined to
follow her advice in the execution of so heinous an act."
Together the couple gets the king's guards drunk and
then arranges to have the king's throat cut while he sleeps
in their castle. When the murder is discovered, the treach-
erous Donwald, pretending to be shocked and horrified,
kills the guardians of the chamber in supposed revenge.
The murder is followed by all sorts of monstrous portents
—
and unnatural signs clouds, wild winds and tempests,
and, worst of all, the horses of Lothian, beautiful and swift,
eating their own flesh.
Shakespeare throws his quill up in the air joyfully: here
is the answer to his problem! He can simply fuse the story
of Macbeth's murder of Duncan (and Banquo) with the
story of Donwald's murder of King Duff, perhaps black-
ening Macbeth's character even more by having him ac-
tually do the murdering himself. By turning Donwald into
Macbeth, Shakespeare can save Banquo's reputation. And
with that problem out of the way, the plav\vright can con-
centrate on creating the sinister vapors of terror and vi-
olence that swirl around the play. Macbeth is well on
its way.
 SOURCES AND RESOURCES 163

Tragical-Plutarchal

After relying on the English chroniclers for several of

his history plays, Shakespeare turns to a different sort of
historical source, the more psychologically oriented bi-
ographies of Brutus, Coriolanus, and Mark Antony, writ-
ten by the Greek Plutarch and translated by Thomas North.
North's Plutarch is perfectly suited to Shakespeare's needs:
Plutarch provides him with the inherently dramatic con-
tradictions within characters and with illustrative little
stories, while North supplies him with much of the gor-
geous language.
A striking example of the way Shakespeare transforms
Plutarch's words — in this instance into a masterpiece of
—
sensual expression is the famous description by Eno-
barbus of Cleopatra on her barge in Antony and Cleopatra.
Imagine Shakespeare reading Plutarch's prosaic descrip-
tion of the barge in North's translation: "the poop whereof
was gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which
kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes,
citherns, viols, and other such instruments." Note how
Shakespeare's fine hand transforms these lines for Eno-
barbus to speak on the stage. "The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were
lovesick with them. The oars were silver. Which to the
tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they
beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes." How
gorgeously Shakespeare takes the cold facts of the histo-
rian and heats them up with perfumed sails, lovesick winds,
silver oars caressing the water "as amorous of their strokes."
Now we cannot only see Cleopatra, we can taste her, smell
her, and feel her exotic presence. In this one example, we
can actually understand the process of Shakespeare's great
mind.
 CHAPTER 12

English as a
Foreign Language

Shakespeare's Language

Shakespeare's words have been uttered in many nations

and in many languages during the last four hundred
years: Shylock can ask "Hath not a Jew eyes?" in Swahili,
and Juliet can exclaim "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art
thou Romeo?" in Serbo-Croatian. Certainly good trans-
lations preserve the vividness of Shakespeare's characters
—
and the universality of his themes but no matter how
good they are, they cannot convey the quintessence of
Shakespeare's greatness. The flavor or spirit of a language
is almost always lost in any translation; here that loss
is incalculably great— for Shakespeare the dramatist is
inseparable from Shakespeare the poet of Elizabethan
language.
Words are the core of what Shakespeare and his
theater are all about. It is through language that he
paints the set and creates mood, emotion, and atmo-
sphere. And it is through language that he breathes life
into his characters. Shakespeare moves us with the same
rhetoric and rhythms that have moved audiences for cen-
turies.
 —
ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 165

Lending Him Our Ears

Shakespeare's language, when spoken, both entertains

and audiences. The principles of word-patterning,
stirs
or language arranged for effect, are gathered together
under a term that has fallen into disgrace in our time
"rhetoric."
In the sixteenth centurv', however, the term didn't im-
ply insincerity; it was simply what divided ordinary talk
from poetic language. Rhetoric was the arrangement of
words in certain artificiaror uhliFelike patterns, called ffg-"
Tires and tropes, to achieve results of beauty or power. As~
axontemporar\- writer put it, rhetoric was "a novelty of
language evidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged from
the ordinary habit and manner of our daily talk and writ-
ing. .
." Rhetorical devices dressed up plain everyday lan-
.

guage in rich, sumptuous clothes that rarely failed to have

an impact.
Most Elizabethan writers thought that rhetoric was a
useful, natural, even preferable way to express feelings
and emotion; the more rhetorical a work, the more ele-
gant and persuasive it was considered. Scores of hand-
books and tracts were written on the subject of rhetoric.
Schoolboys struggled to master hundreds of rhetorical
figures with such unpronounceable Greek names as "hen-
diadys," "polyptoton," and "bdelygmia." Rhetorical studies
employed many technical terms to describe things that
might go unnoticed today. Some have a familiar ring to
them, such as "allegory," "alliteration," and "repetition."
Others have far more intimidating names. "Hyper-
bole," for example, was the Greek name for exaggeration,
such as that with which Doll Tearsheet comforts Falstaff
in Henry IV Part 2: "Thou art as valorous as Hector of
Troy, worth five of Agamemnon, and ten times better than
the Nine Worthies." "Anaphora" was repetition at the be-
—
ginning of several consecutive sentences as in Petru-
chio's indignant questioning from The Taming of the Shrexw

Have I not in my time heard lions roar?

Have I not heard the sea, puffed up with winds.
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
 !

1 66 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,

And heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?

Have I not in a pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?

And "anastrophe" was simply an unusual word order in a

—
sentence a Shakespearean favorite, as this jigsaw puzzle
of a sentence from The Tempest illustrates: "... at pick'd
leisure, Which shall be shortly, single I'll resolve you. Which
to you shall seem probable, of every These happen'd ac-
cidents."
Even these few examples amply demonstrate that
Shakespeare knew his rhetoric. In some of his earlier plays,
he seems to be enthralled with rhetoric for its own sake;
these plays could be chapters in sixteenth-century rhetoric
textbooks. Richard III, for example, is filled with elaborate
and formal rhetorical devices. Shakespeare wraps up the
remarkable scene in which the devilish Duke of Gloucester
wooes Anne with a flourish of "stichomythia," an extremely
stylized device in which speakers alternate single lines of
poetry:

ANNE I would I knew

thy heart.
RICHARD 'Tis figured in my
tongue.
ANNE I fear me both are false.

RICHARD Then never was man true.

ANNE Well, well, put up your sword.
RICHARD Say, then, my peace is made.
ANNE That shalt thou know hereafter.
RICHARD But shall I live in hope?
ANNE All men, I hope, live so.
RICHARD Vouchsafe to wear this ring.
ANNE To take is not to give.

Throughout the plays Shakespeare's characters use

rhetoric to argue, debate, persuade, and exchange witty
statements. No play is immune from rhetorical contagion
— and as we watch the characters play off each other's
words, we may find ourselves infected with enthusiasm
for these word-patterns. For there's just no getting away
from it.

In Titus Andronicus, for example, Demetrius sets out

 ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 167

a persuasive little syllogism justifying the rape of Lavinia

to Aaron:

She is a woman, therefore may be

wooed;
She is a woman, therefore may be
won;
She is Lavinia, therefore must be
loved.

On a lighter note, Julia and Lucetta have an absolutely

delightful debate about Julia's various suitors in The Two
Gentlemen of Verona, including Proteus:

JULIA And wouldst thou have me cast my love on him?

LUCETTA Ay, you thought your love not cast away.
if

JULIA Why, he of all the rest hath never moved me.

LUCETTA Yet he of all the rest I think best loves ye.
JULIA His little speaking shows his love but small.
LUCETTA Fire that's closest kept bums most of all.
JULIA They do not love that do not show their love.
LUCETTA O, they love least that let men know their love.

That master of mercurial rhetoric, Much Ado's Bene-

dick, establishes himself as a merciless show-off as he
subverts a conversation between Don Pedro and Claudio
about Claudio's love for Hero:

CLAUDIO That I love her, I feel.

DON PEDRO That she is I know.

worthy,
BENEDICK That I neither feel how she
should be loved nor know how she should be wor-
thy is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me. I
will die in it at the stake.

In addition to more formal rhetoricaIile\dc£S, Shake-

speare frequently resorted to sjxople- wordplay, with an
emphasis on punning. Although Shakespeare has come
under fire for his frequent punning (Samuel Johnson said
it held "some malignant power over his mind"), puns in

his time were signs of st3Jj^ticeleganceari4wer^^

U)ols for argumgjiUJiot tKeae5ased ari3~slTly rormorTiu-
 —
168 SHAKESPEARE alive!

mor some people think they are today. Shakespeare was

addicted to witty wordplay: Love's Labor's Lost has an
estimated two hundred puns, and the average is around
eighty per play.
There are puns on words that sound the same, such
as Touchstone's pun in As You Like It on "goats" and "Goths,"
which were pronounced alike in Shakespeare's day, or
Falstaff s effort in Henry IV Part I, when he tells Hal, "were
it not here apparent that thou art heir apparent. ." Ham-
. .

let, one of Shakespeare's champion punners, rebuffs Clau-

dius' attempt to call him "son" by responding, "I am too
much in the sun." And Cassius makes a revealing joke
about Julius Caesar's preeminence when he says, "Now is
it Rome indeed, and room enough. When there is in it but

one only man!"

There are also puns on words that have more than
one meaning. Portia plays on two meanings of "will" when
she says, "so is the will of a living daughter cu rbed by_
the will of" adead father." Arid Pistol refers both to his
departure and his future livelihood when he punningly
proclaims in Henry V, "To England will I steal, and there
I'll steal."
Shakespeare's characters sometimes pun in what we
might consider the most inappropriate circumstances
which must have tickled his audience. Lady Macbeth,
about to carry out her dastardly crime, declares "I'll gild
the faces of the grooms withal, For it must seem their
guilt." Defying Richard II, the dying John of Gaunt puns
on his name —
"Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a
grave." And the great Mark Antony, lamenting beside the
dead body of Caesar, finds time for a pun: "O world, thou
wast the forest to this hart, And this indeed, O world, the
heart of thee!" Even in death Shakespeare finds room for
a pun.

From Good to Verse

SHAKESPEARE WROTE HIS plays largely in Wank verse::^ui>__

rhymed iambic pentameter of five beats per line. Although
 ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 1 69

writing a play in poetry may seem unnatural to us, it was

the common method in Shakespeare's time. For one thing,
the rhythm of the poetry made jnemorization easier (as
many modem actors will attestj; with the number of roles
an actor had to keep in his head at once, easy memori-
zation was a priority. And verse was a subtle way t o ma-
nipulate the emotions o f the audience with its flowing yet
"
InsfsFent current.
But the most important purpose of verse was a dra-
matic one: through it Shakespeare delineated character
and unfolded subtler meanings. He took a much less bom-
bastic approach than many of his contemporaries, pre-
ferring music to thunder —
but oh, the variety of the music
he plays! Sometimes his poetry is a baroque air of magic
and fantasy, like the four-beat verses of the fairies in A
Midsummer Night's Dream. Other times it raps out a
—
stem military march the kind of verse-music Coriolanus
is most at home with. And in such plays as Othello,
Hamlet, and Lear, Shakespeare composes music of tragic
intensity, with powerful rhythms and gentle but relent-
less waves of sound that carry the verse forward — as in
Othello's final speech, "Soft you; a word or two before
you go."
Of course Shakespeare didn't allow verse to monop-
olize rhythm. Even when he wrote in prose, he had an
unfailing ear for the sounds of words and used prose
rhythms on the stage just as effectively as those of verse.
As You Like It is almost entirely in prose: indeed, Jaques
abandons Orlando's company when the young swain un-
intentionally speaks a line of iambic pentameter, declar-
ing, "Nay, then, God b' wi' [be with] you, an [if] you talk
in blank verse." Lear goes mad in prose. Benedick and
Beatrice fall in love to the intoxicating rhythms of their
own witty prose, and Juliet's Nurse patters her delightful
prose through Romeo and Juliet.
way Hamlet
signifies a change of mood by slipping from verse into
more comfortable prose, and Othello deteriorates from
dignified verse into an almost incoherent babbling as he
capitulates to his jealous frenzy
—
"noses, ears, and lips.
Is 't possible? Confess —
handkerchief! —
O devil!" Prose,
like verse, isa many-splendored thing in Shakespeare's
skilled hands.
170 SHAKESPEARE alive!

Crossing the Border

EVEN THOUGH shakespeare's language may be the most

effective stage language ever created, it can also be the
single biggest hurdle for modern readers and audiences.
His vocabulary is sometimes incomprehensible, his word
order strangely convoluted, and his grammatical usage
unlike anything we've ever heard. Many of us might want
to say to Shakespeare the words Hermione utters to Leontes
in The Winter's Tale
— "Sir, You speak a language that I
understand not." Much of his language, we might suspect,
wouldn't make it past the eagle eye of a modern-day En-
glish teacher. For initially, Shakespeare's plays appear to
be full of grammatical mistakes and bizarre usages.
For example, he frequently uses double negatives. In
As You Like It, Celia cries, "I pray you, bear with me; I
cannot go no further." Subject and verb don't always agree:
in Julius Caesar, Cassius says to Antony "The posture of
your blows are yet unknown," and Falstaff quizzes a young
servant in Henry IV Part 2 "Is there not wars? Is there not
employment?" Adjectives often follow their nouns instead
of coming before them: Claudio in Measure for Measure
wonders "whether that the body public be A horse whereon
the governor doth ride," and Othello speaks of "antres vast
and deserts idle." Shakespeare sometimes even ends his
sentences with prepositions, as in Richard III when Clar-
ence tells of his dream: "Methoughts I saw a thousand
fearful wracks; Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon."
There seems to be a great deal of carelessness in the
greatest poetr\' of the English language. But before we
convict our hapless playwright on charges of disturbing
the grammatical peace, we might first take a whiff of the
linguistic atmosphere in which he was writing. The order
of the day, when it came to language, wasc/i5order. Despite
the regular and sensible linguistic model of Latin^ English
gramm;^r gjiH ^yntav w^rf sprawU ng in all directio ns, free
of any straitjacketing notions of correctness. Nouns didn't
need to match their verbs, and a word might be spelled
three different ways within a single paragraph. Word or-
der was a complete free-for-all: objects could precede verbs,
adjecti ves could tollow" nouns, "and questions could be asked
 ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 171

simply by reversing the verb (Macbeth asks Banquo, "Ride

you this afternoon?"). ElHpsis, in which a subject or a verb
is left out and supplied by the mind of the reader, was
common. The general guideline was that energy and color
in language were much more interesting than logic and
agreement.
The language of Shakespeare's time was branching out
in wild profusion, growing richer and more varied as the
country opened its eyes and its doors to the great world
beyond its own shores. The sixteenth centurv' was an age
of linguistic as well as global and intellectual expansion.
The growth of international trade, the revival of Greek
and Latin works, and the influx of information about other
countries all had their effect on the language of Eliza-
bethan England.
In fact, the use of words from other languages was a
controversial topic of the day. Many linguistic patriots
were outraged by the importation of foreign words, al-
though there were thousands of Greek, French, Saxon and
Latin words already in the English vocabulary. They con-
demned them as unpatriotic contaminations of English
and argued that only words that bore the all-important
"Made In England" stamp should be allowed into the
country. One pamphleteer asserted "that our own tongue
should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unman-
gled with borrowing of other tongues." He was not alone.
"The more monosyllables you use, the truer Englishman
you shall seem," counselled another. These writers made
fun of their colleagues who frequently borrowed foreign
words, ridiculing them in sentences they composed: "I
being a scholasticall panion obtestate your sublimity to
extol mine infirmity."
Still, there were plenty of moderates to speak in de-
fense of an open-door policy for verbal immigrants. One
writer thought it perfectly all right to "augment our En-
glish tongue" with words from "Greek, Latin, or any other
tongue." An open-minded writer pointed out that such
Latin-based words as "conduct," "function," "figurative,"
and "indignity" had become staples of the English language
and were therefore acceptable; in the next breath, though,
he warned against the suspiciously new-fangled "auda-
and "compatible," which time has since
cious," "egregious,"
proved enduring. Still another considered the immense
172 SHAKESPEARE alive!

numbers of borrowed foreign terms an asset: "Seeing then

we borrow (and that not shamefully) from the Dutch, the
Breton, the Roman, the Dane, the French, ItaHan, and
Spaniard, how can our stock be other than exceeding plen-
tiful?" And a contemporary of Shakespeare's who was an
actor and playwright praised playwrights for their role in
improving the language: "Our English tongue ... is now
by this secondary means of playing, continually refined,
every writer striving in himself to add a new flourish unto
it; so that in the process, from the most rude and unpol-

ished tongue, it is grown to a most perfect and composed

language." In the end, of course, as they always do, lin-
guistic conserv^atives and protectionists failed to stem the
tide of change. And so foreign words flowed steadily into
England both from the shores of Greco-Roman antiquity
and those of the modern-day Continent.
Shakespeare, ever the man of his times, had his share
of foreign words and phrases. Sometimes, as Benedick
says of Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, "his words
are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes."
Latinisms abound: Cordelia in Lear bids "All blest se-
crets ... Be aidant and remediate In the good man's dis-
tress." Agamemnon distinguishes himself as the stud of
Latinisms in Troihis and Cressida by using four Latin-
derived words within fifteen lines: "conflux," "tortive," "pro-
tractive," and "persistive." (None of these words caught
on!)
Shakespeare often used Latin words that we recognize
—
today but in their literal or original meanings. When
Macbeth shouts at Banquo's ghost, "Thou hast no spec-
ulation in those eyes Which thou dost glare with," he
means that Banquo lacks the power of seeing, not that he
is failing to consider an investment in the stock market.
When Parolles refers to "an advertisement to a proper
maid in Florence" in All's Well That Ends Well, he is saying
that he has sent her a warning, not a suggestion that she
buy cosmetics or rug-cleaner. Similarly, an "accident" in
Shakespeare is usually just an "occurrence," and Hamlet's
"extravagant" ghost is one who wanders out of bounds,
not a big spender.
Latin wasn't the only lender. Shakespeare took from
Portuguese as well, using the word crusado, a gold coin;
and from French he borrowed oeillades, meaning "looks
 —
ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 173

of love." Italianwas well represented, especially in Tlw

Taming of the Shrew. Hortensio says to Petruchio, "I shall
be your ben venuto [welcome]," and Lucio cries, "Basta
[enough], content thee, for I have it full." Mercutio mocks
Italian fencing terms in Romeo and JuUet: "Ah, the im-
mortal po^sac^o! Th^punto reverso\ The hay!" for Mercutio
Can't abide people who use pretentious foreign phrases
"The pox of such antic, lisping, affecting phantasimes,
these new tuners of accent."

In general Shakespeare applied a light hand to the use

of foreign words, ridiculing those, like Don Armado, Hol-
ofemes, and Sir Nathaniel in Love's Labor's Lost, who use
them in excess. He was much more interested in seeing
how far his native language could be stretched. If the
existing language didn't provide him with quite what he
needed, he could either resculpt an old word or invent a
new one altogether.
Shakespeare played the variations in his native tongue
to their full advantage. He nonchalantly switched around
parts of speech as the circumstances require. Verbs play
the roles of nouns: Anne accuses the evil Duke of Glouces-
ter in Richard HI of making earth into a living hell and
filling it "with cursing cries and deep exclaims." And nouns
magically become verbs: lago declares to Othello, "O, 'tis
the spite of hell, the fiend's arch-mock. To Up a wanton in
a secure couch." Edgar laments of Lear, "He childed as I
fathered." And Menenius commands the Tribunes in Cor-
iolaniis, "Go, you that banished him: A mile before his
tent fall down and knee The way into his mercy." And
within a single sentence Sir Hugh Evans demonstrates
how a noun can be both a verb and an adjective, solemnly
promising Slender The Merry Wives of Windsor, "I will
in
description the matter to you, if you be capacity of it."

Among Shakespeare's most important tools in chang-

ing one part of speech to another were prefixes and
suffixes. "Be-" is useful for turning a noun into a verb
Prospero in The Tempest boasts, "I have bedimmed The
noontide sun;" and Albany rebukes Goneril in King Lear,
"Bemottster not thy feature." It can also make intransitive
verbs transitive, as when Puck says in A Midsummer Night's
Dream, "the vjo\i behowls the moon." Another Shakespear-
ean favorite is "en-," as when the Prologue to Act 4 of
174 SHAKESPEARE alive!

Henry V tells us that the King shows no worry over "How

dread an army hath enrounded him," and lago plots to
"make the net That shall enmesh them all." Salerio imag-
ines how the treacherous rocks might wreck his ships and
"Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks."
Suffixes were equally versatile instruments: "-ly" and
"-y," for example, turn nouns into adjectives, as when Au-
tolycus asks, "But what talk we of these traitorly rascals?"
{The Winter's Tale) or the Doctor in Macbeth refers to Lady
Macbeth's "slumbery agitation." And often Shakespeare
combined good old native Anglo-Saxon prefixes or suffixes
with elaborate Latin roots to create such hybrid words as
"increaseful," "exteriorly," "unseminared," "entreatments,"
and this whopper from Othello, "exsufflicate." Armado gets
off a double whammy when he orders Moth to "give en-
largement to the swain, bring him festinately hither."
When he ran out of steam with prefixes and suffixes,
there was always compounding to play with. Shakespeare
must have entertained himself for hours making up word
combinations, joining adjectives and nouns, adverbs and
—
nouns, participles and prepositions all with the help of
the ever-adaptable hyphen.
Shakespeare's compounds come in all sorts of flavors.
There are noun compounds, such as "thick-lips," "brazen-
face," and "fat-guts." Cleopatra calls herself "marble-
constant," and Cordelia invokes the pity of the gods on
her "child-changed father." Tormented by jealousy, Othello
bids farewell to "The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing
fife."
There are verb compounds, too; King Henry V brushes
aside the prudish opinions of "all find-faults" as he pre-
pares to kiss his Kate; Rosalind warns Orlando against
being a "pathetical break-promise" in As You Like It; and
in Love's Labor's Lost Berowne reels off a list of abusive
compounds as he grumbles that "Some carry-tale, some
please-man, some slight zany. Some mumble-news Told
. . .

our intents before."

There are compounds made with adverbs Imogen —
prepares for her "hence-going" in Cymbeline, while Malcolm
refers to Macduff s "here-approach" in Macbeth; and there
are compounds made with adjectives, such as "childish-
foolish," "heady-rash," and "rocky-hard." The lowly prep-
osition isn't forgotten; Prince Hal, speaking to his father.
 ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE 175

calls himself "your unthoughl-of Harrv." Sometimes there

are even compounds of compounds, in such phrases as
"the always-wind-obeying deep" from The Comedy of Er-
rors and "a world-without-end bargain" in Love's Labor's
Lost. Often Shakespeare lets loose with an especially vivid
compound, such as the insult Thersites hurls at Ajax in
Troilus and Cressida, "thou mongrel beef-witted lord," or
Armado's dismissal of Costard as "that unlettered small-
knowing soul" in Love's Labor's Lost.
either of the two "-fixes" or compounding didn't pro-
If
videwhat he needed, Shakespeare might very well have
made up a word. He usually did this for comic purposes.
One of the funniest examples of his linguistic inventive-
ness is the scene in All's Well where the soldiers blindfold
and kidnap Parolles to trick him into betraying Bertram.
As the accompanying lords gabble on, they come up with
such gems of nonsense as "Throca movousus, cargo, cargo,
cargo" and "Oscorbidulchos volivorco." If this is funny to
read, it is that much more hilarious to hear.
Shakespeare's inventiveness and versatility seem to have
had no bounds. Besides his extraordinary range of foreign
importation and native production, he drew on technical
terms of coinage, law, sailing, falconry, and medicine,
among others. He also had an incredible repertoire of
terms of abuse, vulgarity, and profanity.
If all this is true, one might ask, why is he so hard to
understand today? The simple answer is that language
changes; just as it grew and expanded in Shakespeare's
time, so it has developed through the centuries, and many
words that served a need then have fallen out of use, re-
placed by more relevant or functional words. This happens
in every age. An Elizabethan who came to the twentieth
century would be as mystified by our words "Reebok,"
"rayon," and "user-friendly" as we are by Shakespeare's
"chopine," "kecksy," and "to slubber" (a kind of shoe, a
wild plant, and to treat carelessly). Shakespeare, like any
good dramatist, filled his plays wath contemporary vocab-
ulary, words that reflected the daily lives and immediate
concerns of his audience.
But words aren't the real trouble-
in fact, these archaic
makers; easy enough to keep an eye out for them, for
it's

they are like red flags directing us to footnotes or diction-

aries. More dangerous are the words that seem familiar
1 76 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

— ones we think we recognize but that mean something

different now than they did then. For example, when a
Shakespearean character says he'll do something "pres-
ently" he means im.mediately, not "whenever I get around
to it." When Nym in The Merry Wives of Windsor worries,
"I love not the humor of it," he isn't talking about a bad
joke, but about the general tone or tenor of the situation.
When Hamlet says to his friends, "I'll make a ghost of him

that lets me," he means "stops me" rather than "allows

me." Polonius' complaint that Hamlet is "Still harping on
my daughter" doesn't mean quite what we think it does
either; "still" means "always" in Shakespeare's English.
And when Friar Lawrence says that the letter he sent to
Romeo was "not nice," he isn't implying that it insulted
the youth but that it was not trivial or insignificant.
Even characters within Shakespeare's plays sometimes
have trouble with meanings; after all, Costard in Love's
Labor's Lost thinks that "remuneration" means three far-
things. And the rebel Jack Cade in Henry VI Part 2 may
speak for many a hapless modern student in his indict-
ment of Lord Say: "It will be proved to thy face," he says
accusingly, "that thou hast men about thee that usually
talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as
no Christian ear can endure to hear."
Shakespeare's audience might have cheered Cade on
here; certainly not everyone understood every word they
heard. But it's highly unlikely that they worried too much
about it. These people were listeners and spectators, not
scholars and readers. They were intent on absorbing the
sounds, the rhythms, and the gist of the language. That's
how we should approach it, too, whether reading a play
in a quiet room or watching Shakespeare come to life,
again and again, in the hustle and bustle of the living
theater.
 CHAPTER 13

Shakespeare
Alive?

Globe-Trotter

In 1982, AN "off year," there were well over one million

visitors to Shakespeare's native Stratford in England, most
of them foreigners. The United States topped the list, with
the United Kingdom a close second. But native English
speakers weren't the only pilgrims to pay homage at
Shakespeare's shrine. Visitors also came from Iraq, Iran,
Burma, Algeria, Vietnam, Borneo, Haiti, and Costa Rica,
among others; there was even one each from Estonia,
Ethiopia, Madagascar and Mongolia.
Although Shakespeare may have made his home in
Stratford, he has obviously found a home in every comer
of the world since then. Even during his lifetime, his plays
were performed by Catholic recusants in the north of En-
gland, on a ship off of Sierra Leone, and in the cities of
Elbing and Gdansk in eastern Europe. In the subsequent
four centuries Shakespeare's plays seem to have gone
everywhere else as well; each nation has annexed him and
made him its own by translating, adapting, and perform-
ing his plays.
Only the Bible has been translated into more languages
than Shakespeare. Among can be found in an-
others, he
cient Latin, modem Greek, Assamese, Chinese, Turkish,
Yiddish, Bengali, Gujarati, Swahili, and at least twenty-
 !

1 78 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

eight of the languages of the modern-day Soviet Union.

The Germans were already busy translating him in the
early 1600s; on the other hand, the first complete trans-
lation of Shakespeare in Serbo-Croatian wasn't finished
until 1963.
His track record of stage performance is no less im-
pressive. Shakespeare has been glimpsed in a lunatic asy-
lum in Greece, in a village of mud huts in Zanzibar, and
on the ramparts of a ruined fifteenth-century fort over-
looking the Straits of Bosphorus in Turkey. A French ac-
tress got so carried away while performing the role of Kate
in The Taming of the Shrew that she fell into the orchestra
pit.Never mind that at the first genuine performance of
Othello in Italy, given at Milan in 1845, the audience laughed
so hard that the show had to be stopped (they misunder-
stood the opening scene and thought it was a farce): the
Italians adore Shakespeare. A Japanese acting company
risked the wrath of the Tokyo police in 1901 when it de-
liberately performed Julius Caesar a month after the as-
sassination of a prominent political leader. And most
recently, Shakespeare crossed the Great Wall into China
for that nation's first-ever Shakespeare Festival in Peking,
where A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed by a
troupe of coal miners, and King Lear was set in the dark-
ness and oppression of feudal China.
Foreigners the world over have been eloquent wit-
nesses to Shakespeare's power to move and stir his au-
diences. After seeing Hamlet in 1866, the dashing Italian
general Garibaldi declared ruefully, "That Shakespeare is
a great magician; he kept me awake all night." The German
political philosopher, Karl Marx, commented in the nine-
teenth century that Launce and his dog (from The Two
Gentlemen of Verona) were more valuable than all German
comedies put together. A Frenchman declared that Shake-
speare is "part and parcel of our literary consciousness."
One observer at the brand-new China Shakespeare Fes-
tival commented that "the Chinese love Shakespeare so
much that in a few years time they will say the bard was
Chinese."
He might just as well have said Indian, or Japanese,
or Polish. Every nation pats itself on the back for keeping
Shakespeare alive; and every nation finds itself in Shake-
speare. A German will look at Hamlet and see the mirror
 —
SHAKESPEARE ALIVE? 179

of the German soul; a native of India will make Hamlet

an Indian, like the writer who scrawled, "What are we
Indians, but pale Hamlets, sick with too much thinking
and chattering?" A provincial Scottish troupe in the eight-
eenth centurv' reached an impasse when ever>' actor in-
sisted on playing Hamlet, and only Hamlet — the company
settled it by abandoning the play.
To some, Shakespeare is a provider of endless delight
and entertainment; the empress of Russia, Catherine the
Great, translated and reworked The Merry Wives of Wind-
sor and Timon of Athens along Russian lines. To others,
Shakespeare is a source of inspiration in times of hardship
or turmoil. The French performed his plays during the
German occupation of Paris in World War II, when En-
glish books were banned. The Armenians, engaged in a
struggle for political autonomy, are said to have taken
courage from the struggles of King Lear, Macbeth, Shy-
lock, and Othello. And in 1916, though they were in the
middle of World War I, the people of Yugoslavia took time
out to organize a ceremony for the three hundredth an-
niversary of Shakespeare's death, basing their celebration
on the same premise that our observer in China stated
that Shakespeare truly belongs to all nations.

Transatlantic Shakespeare

Perhaps he does, but Americans would like to believe that

he is just a little more at home in the United States than
anywhere else. Shakespeare has made frequent cameo ap-
pearances in the chronicles of American history, and he's
meant many different things to people at various times in
the life of the republic. Early American citizens loved him
for his tales of swashbuckling and romance; early Amer-
ican statesmen looked to him for examples of political
wisdom and moral courage. He also provided journalists
and cartoonists with endless material to use in their com-
mentaries on the state of the union.
The first presidents were lovers of Shakespeare. George
Washington's boyhood home contained six volumes of
Shakespeare's plays, and several signers of the Declaration
 !

1 80 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

of Independence owned Shakespeare volumes. John Adams

got up at four o'clock on a winter morning to answer a
letter about Hamlet and to "commune with a lover and
worthy representative of Shakespeare upon the glories of
this immortal bard." Abraham Lincoln carried a copy of
Macbeth (his favorite) with him as he rode the law circuits
in Illinois. Later, when he was president, a copy of Shake-
speare sat on the White House desk (along with the Bible
and the U.S. Statutes). Art, religion, and society what —
else did one need for a full understanding of the achieve-
ment and genius of humankind but these three books?
Both sides enlisted Shakespeare's help in the American
Revolution. Writers revised and revamped Hamlet's fa-
mous question to dramatize the conflicting impulses within
the rebelling colony. A Tory loyalist lambasted the rebels
by asking,

—
To sign or not to sign! That is the question:
Whether 't were better for an honest man
—
To sign and so be safe . . .

or to risk the consequences of loyalty by refusing to sign

the oath of rebellion against Britain. A Boston newspaper
pondered the taxation question similarly:

Be taxt or not be taxt— that is the question.

Whether 'tis nobler in our minds to suffer
The sleights and cunning of deceitful statesmen
Or to petition 'gainst illegal taxes
And by opposing, end them?

Once war had actually broken out, Shakespeare ap- j

peared behind the lines of both the British and the rebel |
armies. Clinton's Thespians, a group of British officers
under the command of General Clinton during the oc-
cupation of New York, put on productions of Richard III,
Macbeth, and Garrick's Catherine and Petruchio (a short-
ened version of The Taming of the Shrew) to while away
the time. And dispirited American soldiers in New Hamp-
shire,discouraged by the feeling that their sacrifices and
suffering for their new country weren't being appreciated,
found companionship and solace in Shakespeare's Cor-
iolanus, another story of ingratitude for military service.
 1

SHAKESPEARE ALIVE? 1 8

In fact, makeshift military productions were the only

entertainment going during the Revolution; in 1774, in
the interests of economizing, the Continental Congress
closed down the theater and other wartime extravagances
such as horse racing, cockiighting, and gambling. Up to
that time, Shakespeare had been a familiar and popular
plav'wright on the American stages of New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, Richmond, and Charleston.
Shakespeare had made his first transatlantic crossing
in 1752, when a group of actors arrived from England
to perform The Merchant of Venice in Williamsburg, Vir-
ginia (preferring this hospitable southern city to the rocky
morcil terrain of Puritan New England). No doubt the
playwright would have felt right at home in the theater
—
conditions in early America enthusiastic audiences, un-
predictable theater arrangements, and gritty opposition
from the New England Puritan faction. In addition, the
colonial audiences were as responsive as any to be found
at the Globe in the 1590s. For example, when the emperor
and empress of the Cherokee Indians saw a performance
of Othello in 1752, they were so startled by the stage sword-
play that the empress ordered her attendants to go stop
the actors before they killed each other. Things in America
weren't so different from what they had been in Shake-
speare's London, where spectators would sometimes climb
up on stage and make more ruckus than the actors!
Although the United States won its political indepen-
dence in 1776, theatrical independence was a longer time
in coming. The American stage tended to mimic whatever
was going on in London; the famous English actor David
Garrick's huge success with Richard III was a surefire
guarantee that it would be popular in America. More-
over, many English actors crossed over to tour in the ex-
colonies, either because they hadn't been able to make it
on the London stage or because they hoped for financial
gain. Such imported actors as the flamboyant G. F. Cooke,
the fieryEdmund Kean, and the elegant and eloquent Wil-
liam Charles Macready were tremendously popular with
American audiences (although Edmund Kean was never
forgiven for refusing to perform for a Boston audience he
considered too small, and Macready was plagued by anti-
British prejudices).
Gradually, though, America began to develop an acting
 —
1 82 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

tradition of its own, led by such native-bom actors as

J. H. Hackett, the first major American actor to perform
in England; the towering Edwin Forrest, whose rivalry
with the British Macready culminated in a bloody riot in
New York City that left thirty-one people dead; the great
nineteenth-century actress Charlotte Cushman, who daz-
zled London with her performance as Romeo; and Edwin
Booth, the best-loved actor of nineteenth-century Amer-
ica, most famous for his quiet and graceful Hamlet.
While city audiences were oohing and aahing English
productions and actors were refining Shakespeare on stately
stages in wealthy old cities, out on the frontier people were
just having a good old time. Rough, rugged, and rowdy
themselves, they responded heartily to Shakespeare's mel-
odrama, spectacle, bloodshed, and oratory; plays that ex-
emplified these virtues Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and
—
Julius Caesar were performed over and over again in
saloons and mining camps, in billiard halls and village
halls, and on Mississippi riverboats and wagon trains
plodding West. And in the 1 840s, a band of Seminole In-
dians gave a new twist to frontier Shakespeare: they at-
tacked a traveling company in Florida, appropriated their
costumes, and were later taken into custody wearing the
costumes of Othello, Hamlet, and Julius Caesarl
Frontier people especially loved Shakespeare's rhetoric
— the force and power of shouted passages, the grandeur
of accumulated phrases, the patterns of the speeches. They
weren't put off by his vocabulary because they themselves
used a lot of tall talk and often created words with suffixes
—
and prefixes "bodacious," "monstropolous," and "ex-
flunctificate."They weren't alone in this; speechmaking
had been a way of life in American politics even before
Patrick Henry uttered his famous one-liner, "Give me lib-
erty or give me death!" Oratory was practically a national
pastime and made Americans all the more receptive to
Shakespeare on the stage. The American poet Walt Whit-
man used to ride down Broadway in the old omnibuses
declaiming passages from Julius Caesar or Richard HI to
bemused passersby.
That Shakespeare has lived through many of the crises
and triumphs of American history is indisputable; his place
in the national consciousness is assured. Once, long ago,
before America had even become a nation, the playwright
 SHAKESPEARE ALI\T? 183

even saved someone's life: in 1764, an officer missed an

Indian ambush because he was floating down the river in
a canoe at the time —
reading Antony and Cleopatral

Versions and Reversions

If SHAKESPEARE CROSSES national borders with the ease of

a man on a flying trapeze, he also traverses the boundaries
of genre with equal aplomb. Through the centuries his
plays have been made into operas, ballets, films, novels,
—
poems, and musicals not to mention a spate of bur-
lesques and parodies. Like Falstaff in Henry IV Part 2,
Shakespeare is not only witty in himself, but the cause
that wit is in other men.
Hundreds of composers and librettists have created
operas out of Shakespeare's plays. Although separated by
nearly three hundred years, both Henry Purcell (in 1692)
and Benjamin Britten (in 1960) have "operatized" A Mid-
summer Night's Dream. Hamlet, Macbeth, Tlie Tempest,
and Romeo and Juliet are all now operas as well as plays.
Some of the greatest composers of every generation find
themselves challenged and inspired by Shakespeare. The
Italian composer Verdi, having already composed the op-
eras of Macbeth and Falstaff, capped his career with per-
haps his greatest achievement, Otello, in which the Moor's
tragedy is heightened and intensified by the majesty of
Verdi's music.
Ballets, too, abound: Romeo and Juliet and A Midsum-
mer Night's Dream seem to be the most popular of these.
The choreographer George Balanchine took on the latter;
Kenneth MacMillan the former. Mendelssohn, Tchaikov-
sky, and Prokofiev are but a few of the composers to have
written music for Shakespearean ballets.
Shakespeare and the stage musical have also enjoyed
a long and happy partnership. There was a 1976 musical
called Rockababy Hamlet, a rock version of Othello called
Catch My Soul, and a Tony award-winning musical of The
Two Gentlemen of Verona with a distinctly black and Puerto
Rican flavor. In 1939, the jazz greats Louis Armstrong and
Benny Goodman created Swingin the Dream, a black mus-
'
1 84 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

ical adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Louis

Armstrong as Bottom the Fireman, Moms Mabley as Quince
the Midwife, and Butterfly McQueen as Puck in a wild mid-
summer night's romp down in New Orleans. Cole Porter's
KissMe Kate is a justly famous musical version of The
Taming of the Shrew. Songwriters Rodgers and Hart came
up with The Boys From Syracuse, an immensely popular
version of The Comedy of Errors. And everyone knows of
West Side Story, the Broadway hit in which Romeo and
Juliet became Tony and Maria, the Montagues and the
Capulets became the Jets and the Sharks, and Verona
became a community of Puerto Rican and Italian immi-
grants in New York City.
Playwrights, too, have had fun with Shakespeare's plays,
creating extra characters, changing the plot, or focusing
on one aspect of a play. The best-known of these spinoffs
is probably Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstem
Are Dead, in which Hamlet's two friends, who have only
minor roles in Shakespeare's play, become central char-
acters around whom the tragedy is acted out. Stoppard is
very clever at this sort of thing; he also wrote a fifteen-
minute version oi Hamlet to be performed on double-decker
buses in London.
Shakespeare has always been an obvious target for
writers of parody and burlesque, who take his well-known
plays and characters and comically distort them, usually
adding in a heavy measure of social and political satire.
These enjoyed a heyday in the nineteenth century. Such
titles as A Thin Slice of Ham-let!, As You Lump It, and
Antony and Cleopatra; or His-story and Her-story in a Mod-
em Nilo-meter are indications of the irreverent approach
of these parodists. As the prologue to an 1856 burlesque
of The Winter's Tale announces, "I'm here as the Chorus.
The fact is, this play. As written by Shakespeare, won't do
in our day."
One of the funnier American ones. Much Ado About a
Merchant of Venice, is set in the New York City of the
1 860s, and of course tells us more about life in the city at

that time —
the immigrant population, the prominence of
—
Wall Street, legal corruption, political machines than it
does about Shakespeare's play. Antonio and Shylock are
financiers on Wall Street; Nerissa is Portia's Irish maid;
and Portia disguises herself as a "Philadelphia lawyer."
 —
SHAKESPEARE ALIVE? 185

Puns and topical remarks are the order of the day: "He
never feh a wound" (from Romeo and
jests at scars that
Juliet) becomes "He jests at cigars who never learned to
smoke." Shylock's grievances against Antonio center on
the stock market:

Many's the time, sir, when we've chanced to meet.

He's treated me most shameful on the street.

Told me that stocks were up when they were
down;
Made me the laughing stocks of all the town.

And the message on the casket that Bassanio chooses to

win Portia advises him, "You've chosen well, your wife is
no virago; Get married soon, and don't go to Chicago."

In recent decades, filmmakers have joined the long line

of Shakespeare borrowers, capitalizing on the cinematic
nature of Shakespeare's stagecraft: no curtains, no rigid
act division, and a progression of rapidly-switching scenes.
Movies of his plays began with the silent film, which is
hard to believe given that Shakespeare's language is so
central to his work. Sarah Bernhardt was in silent-film
excerpts playing Hamlet, and a 1920 German film of
Hamlet, based on a number of sources, unveiled its hero
at the end as a woman! With the introduction of sound
in 1927, Shakespearean filmmaking took a big step for-
ward; Hollywood can now boast that some of the biggest
movie stars of our time have starred in these films
Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Richard Burton, and
Elizabeth Taylor.
Hollywood has no monopoly on Shakespearean films;
they circle the globe: a Czech puppet film of A Midsummer
Night's Dream; Ophelia, a French adaptation of Hamlet;
and Japanese interpretations of Macbeth and King Lear —
Throne of Blood and Ran, by the director Akira Kurosawa.
Orson Welles filmed Othello and concocted a Falstaffian
brew called Chimes at Midnight; and the great British actor
and director Laurence Olivier made famous movie ver-
sions of Henry V, Richard HI, and Hamlet, which more
people are estimated to have seen in the last thirty years
than have seen the plays in the four hundred years since
Shakespeare's birth.
186 SHAKESPEARE alive!

Perversions on
THE English Stage

Shakespeare's plays have also traveled through centuries

of stage presentation, each age interpreting him in accord
with what was both popular and possible. The results have
sometimes been horrendous, sometimes quite successful,
but always interesting in what they tell us about the tastes
of the time and what they show us about Shakespeare's
seemingly endless capacity to adapt and sundve.
In England, after nearly twenty years of life without
theater under Puritan rule, the English stage was brought
back when the monarchy was restored in the 1660s. Un-
fortunately, the rage for "restoration" extended to Shake-
speare's plays, too, often with disastrous effects. To the
sophisticated and elegant new Court, the stage tactics and
dramatic techniques of the Globe seemed dreadfully prim-
itive and wholly unsuitable to the glitter of the Restoration
stage. Rather than regarding Shakespeare as supreme and
his work as sacred, they considered the plays "a heap of
jewels, unstrung and unpolished," and greatly in need of
stringing.
Unburdened by four centuries of literary history, theater
managers and actors set about bringing Shakespeare up
to snuff for their purposes by making the plays heroic,
—
balanced, grammatically "correct" in other words, mod-
em. Nahum Tate has gone down in history (or infamy) as
the adaptor who gave King Lear a happy ending and made
Edgar and Cordelia fall in love and get married. Even Tate
had doubts about the happy ending "till I found it well-
receiv'd by my audience."
Now that women were permitted to act, Shakespeare
was expanded to accommodate these new players. The
poet John Dryden collaborated with theater manager (and
alleged godson of Shakespeare, if not the illegitimate son
he hinted he might be) William Davenant to create a truly
homfic perversion of The Tempest, in which Miranda has
a sister Dorinda, Ariel a sweetheart, and Caliban a sister
who's as monstrous as he is. The play is full of the bawdy
suggestive jokes that were fashionable at the time, and
 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE? 187

the entire production strangles the spirited Hfe right out

of Shakespeare.
Ahhough we scorn these adaptations as acts of van-
dahsm at the shrine of Shakespeare's plays, they were
immensely popular with audiences, and in fact succeeded
in driving the real Shakespeare into hiding for centuries.
—
Shakespeare "improved" cut, rewritten, adapted, and
—
embellished continued to be quite the fashionable thing
throughout the eighteenth centur\'. Adapting fever was
still running high; even the great tragic actor of the age,
David Garrick, wasn't immune to it. In addition to his
condensed version of The Taming of the Shrew, he also
tried his hand at Romeo and Juliet, altering the ending to
reunite the lovers before they died.
Many profit-thirsty theater managers of the eighteenth
centurv' thought it perfectly reasonable to spice up Shake-
—
speare with light entertainment songs, dances, and in-
terludes between acts or even during the course of the
play. An advertisement for Romeo and Jidiet gave equal
billing to "the Nautical Drama (founded on the popular
ballad) called Black Eyed Susan" and promised "A Mas-
querade and Dance" in Act 1 as well as "the Funeral
Procession of Juliet, and a Solemn Dirge" in Act 5. It was
also a common practice to introduce a flashy afterpiece at
the play's end, which might include musical farce, acro-
batic feats, hornpipe dances, pantomime, even a man who
could catch a peacock feather level on his forehead!
All these additions were designed to feed the public's
appetite for spectacle. The eighteenth centur\' preferred
to consume its Shakespeare with as much visual excite-
ment as possible, and the theater managers, equipped with
innovations like painted scenery and artificial lighting,
were only too happy to oblige.But critics felt differently.
"Three fourths of every audience," grumbled one, "are more
capable of enjoying sound and show, than solid sense and
poetical imagination."

The nineteenth century gave mixed signals about its

Shakespeare. On the one hand, there was a worthy move-
ment afoot to restore Shakespeare's original texts, to do
away with the botched and butchered versions of seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-centur\ adaptors. But on the other
hand, it was the age of blockbuster effects, of unparalleled
 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

scenic splendor designed according to the strictest prin-

ciples of historical authenticity —
and the real Shakespeare
too often got lost beneath all the hoopla. For example, one
actor-manager, Charles Kean, rummaged through books
of English history and medieval heraldry and then added
to Richard II an extravagant pageant for Bolingbroke's
entry into London, a scene that employed five or six hundred
extras onstage.
Such an approach gave new meaning to Shakespeare's
reference inRomeo and Juliet to the "two hours' traffic of our
stage." Sometimes audiences had to wait nearly an hour be-
tween scenes while the elaborate sets were bullied into place.
And, not surprisingly, Shakespeare's poetry was swamped
by the weighty scenery and magnificent visual effects.
But although he may have been buried alive, Shake-
speare somehow managed to survive as the ponderous
nineteenth-centurv' sets tottered their way into well-deserved
oblivion. And long after the names of Nahum Tate, David
Garrick, and Charles Kean have been forgotten, the name
of the poet who was the cause of all this effort lives on,
as it has continued to live for nearlv four centuries.

And Today?

Shakespeare has been just as successful on the modem

stage as he was in the Globe. His plays have attracted such
American actors as Meryl Streep, Raul Julia, Martin Sheen,
Kevin Kline, James Earl Jones, and Elizabeth McGovem,
all of whom have graced the stage in New York Shake-
speare Festival productions.
As in previous ages, the staging of Shakespeare in the
twentieth century reflects the tenor of the times. Orson
Welles depicted Julius Caesar as a fascist dictator in 1937;
Hamlet appeared as an inspiring man of action in a 1945
production given for American G.I.'s. The 1960s saw a
burlesque version of Macbeth making fun of American
politics, called Macbird; and in a production by Jewish
senior citizens in a Brooklyn old folks home, an eighty-
two-year-old Romeo turned to a seventy-year-old Juliet
and asked, "You Jewish?"
 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE? 1 89

There have been all-male, and all-female

all-black,
stagings of Shakespeare. The first recorded black acting
company in America opened in lower Manhattan with
Richard III in 1821. Over a century later, in 1936, Orson
Welles produced his "voodoo" Macbeth at the Lafayette
Theater in Harlem with a cast of one hundred blacks. Set
in Haiti, with real witch doctors, jungle drums, and cac-
kling voodoo priestesses, it was an eerie spectacle and a
huge hit. In 1979, the New York Shakespeare Festival as-
sembled an all-black company that performed Julius Cae-
sar and Coriolanus. As You Like It was staged in the late
1960s with an all-male cast in modem dress. Recently,
The Taming of the Shrew was performed by a cast of women
in an interpretation intended to highlight what they saw
as the play's now-outmoded expressions of chauvinism.
And in 1 986, at the Belasco Theater on Broadway, a com-
pany of African- American, Hispanic, and Asian- American
actors performed Shakespeare's plays for New York City
high-school students, under the auspices of the New York
Shakespeare Festival.
In our century, when the director has taken on a much
greater role in interpreting and guiding a play, there are
as many different approaches to Shakespeare's work as
there are people to think them up. Hamlet may be an
adolescent in the grip of an unresolved Oedipal complex
or a resolute man of action; The Comedy of Errors takes
place in Edwardian England on one stage and in the Amer-
ican West among cowhands and ranchers on another stage.
Whatever the interpretation, it seems that Shakespeare's
plays are so expansive and flexible that they can accom-
modate any race, creed, color, gender, or directorial ap-
proach. Not all versions work equally well, but together
they illustrate how one writer's plays can mean such very
different things to different people.

Shakespeare Alive!

The real mystery is why.

How is it that Shakespeare can continue to entertain,
inspire, and instruct people all around the world? Is it the
190 SHAKESPEARE alive!

themes he addresses? Is it that the human dilemmas he

explores transcend specific centuries and particular civi-
lizations? As a British soldier wrote from the trenches in
World War I, "There is no hardship or terror or doubt that
happens out here that Shakespeare does not touch on or
give advice for"; a copy of Henry V was found on his body
when he died. The terrible randomness of suffering, the
conflict of justice and mercy, the nature of power and the
individual, life within a family, the transforming magic of
love —Shakespeare works and reworks these themes in all
of his plays. Such concerns don't go away; they are an
eternal part of the human condition. Is this what keeps
Shakespeare alive?
Or does it have something to do with the wide range
of his sources? Shakespeare plundered legends and stories
from many cultures, and in rewriting them for the theater
gave them new and enduring life. And, of course, he him-
self became a source that subsequent artists would quarry,
using him as he used his predecessors, as a springboard
for their own creativity. Is this what keeps Shakespeare
alive?
Perhaps it's the language his characters speak. Al-
though some of Shakespeare's vocabulary has become ar-
chaic and his syntax and grammar obsolete, the rhythms
of his lines and the sounds of his words retain their ex-
traordinary power and remarkable emotional expressive-
ness. As one fan enthused in the late 1700s, "In his native
tongue he shall roll the genuine passions of nature." Is
this what keeps Shakespeare alive?
Maybe it's his astonishing characters, so full of vitality
that they practically jump off the page. Each of them seems
to have a life elsewhere, which the play glimpses only
momentarily. And yet so real and vibrant are they that
one Victorian author was inspired to invent biographies
of the childhoods of Rosalind, Celia, Portia, Desdemona,
and all of Shakespeare's heroines, leading up to the point
where the plays begin.
But though they may seem to have lives elsewhere, they
truly come to life only on the stage. Shakespeare's char-
acters are creatures of the theater; they exist not to be
dissected and psychoanalyzed but to be performed. Fal-
staff couldn't exist without an audience to show off for
and a stage to prance and play on; Cleopatra craves a
 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE? 191

theater for her melodramatic histrionics; and where would

Richard III be if he couldn't confide in us?
This insistent vitality isn't just expressed by major
characters like Falstaff, Cleopatra, Hamlet, Rosalind, or
Richard; Shakespeare breathes life into even the most in-
significant of his stage creatures — the spear carriers, the
servants, the children, and the minor courtiers. Think of
the prisoner Bamardine in Measure for Measure, who throws
a monkey wTcnch into the duke's plot by refusing to die
at the convenient time; the Capulets' senant Peter in Ro-
meo and Juliet, who grieves profoundly at Juliet's sup-
posed death; and the nameless servant of Gloucester in
King Lear who runs to fetch flax and egg whites to soothe
his blinded master's bleeding face.
All of Shakespeare's characters, from talkative Hamlet
to the lowliest one-line speaker, are both of life and larger
than life. And they will continue to hold on to that life as
long as they have a theater somewhere. Is this what keeps
Shakespeare alive?

The answer to the question, of course, is all of the

above. Shakespeare's universal themes and human con-
cerns, his rhythmic language and great stories, as well as
his lively theatrical characters, are all part of what keeps
Shakespeare alive.
And yet, centuries of change might easily have killed
him off. Our language and vocabularv, as well as our world
view and our understanding of religion; the rights ac-
corded to women and minorities; our standard of living;
our understanding of the ways and values of other nations;
the behavior of the family; the way our theaters are or-
ganized, equipped, and run; the tastes and preferences of
the audience — all these things are drastically different from
what Shakespeare knew in sixteenth-century England.
In spite of these changes he continues to speak to us
— from the wings of the theater. The comic effect of the
scene in Love's Labor's Lost where each of the four young
men eavesdrop on the next, till they are four deep listening
to each other's confessions of love, is difficult for us to
visualize as readers. Likewise, the cold-blooded cruelty of
Goneril and Regan comes across in all its horrific bar-
barity only when we see the blinding of old Gloucester
carried out in front of our eves. The funnv business of the
 !

1 92 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

frightened jester Trinculo creeping under the long gaber-

dine of the monster Caliban in The Tempest is less vivid
when it's not seen onstage. And the utter comedy of Fal-
staff s cowardice in the theater renders pointless all arm-
chair analyses of his personality by critics. As a German
poet said early in the twentieth century, "the true readers
of Shakespeare and also those in whom Shakespeare is
truly alive are those who carry within them a stage."
No doubt Shakespeare would be astonished to discover
that his plays are still being performed, let alone read, and
are widely hailed as the greatest dramatic works of all
time. After all, he dashed them off, two a year, with little
thought beyond the next day's takings at the Globe, and
whether or not they would be enough to pay the rent.
They were temporary, transient pieces of entertainment,
conceived and written to satisfy the particular tastes of a
particular audience in a particular time and place, and
definitely not sacred works of art to be enshrined.
This is the paradox of it all: the quickly-vanishing me-
— —
dium for which Shakespeare wrote the theater is pre-
cisely what keeps him alive and well today. In adapting
his sources, his language, his characters for the stage, he
transformed them into something immortal. The plays,
the dramatic events that thrilled and delighted Eliza-
bethan audiences nearly four hundred years ago, live on
in the twentieth century, re-created every time an actor
steps up to the footlights and begins to utter the lines of
Hamlet. For as long as the theater continues, and as long
as actors, directors, and producers remain committed to
putting the works of the world's greatest playwright on
the stage where they belong — so, too, will Shakespeare
stay alive.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
{in order of appearance)

Chapter 1 : Daily Life

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD
Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971),
Chapter 1

Wrightson, Keith, and Levine, David, Povertv and Piety in an

English Village (1979)

Wrightson, Keith, English Society 1580-1680 (1982)

Clark, Alice, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth
Century (1919, reprint 1968)
Appleby, Andrew, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (1978)

[p. 5] in Appleby, op. cit.

[p. 5-6] the High Sheriff of Somerset, in Clark, op. cit.

HirriNG THE ROAD

Lee, Sidnev, and Onions, C. T., Life in Shakespeare's England
(1917)"

Beier, A. L., "Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan

England," Past and Present 64 (1974)
Slack, P., "Vagrants and Vagrancy in England," Economic
History Review, second series xxvii (1974)

[p. 7] Stubbes, Philip, Anatomy of Abuses, (1583) ed. F. J.

Furnivall,(New Shakespere Society 1877-82) Series VI,
nos. 4, 6, 12

THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS

Stow, John, Survey of London (1603), ed. C. L. Kingsford
(1908)
Hudson, K., The Woman's Place in Society (1970)

Drummond, J. C, and Wilbraham, A., The Englishman's Food

(1957)
194 SHAKESPEARE alive!

Appleby, A., "Diet in Sixteenth Centuiy England: sources,

problems, and possibilities," in Health, Medicine, and Mor-
tality in Sixteenth Century England, ed. C. Webster (1979)

Harrison, Willianri, Description of England (1577, 1587, ed.

G. Edelen, 1968)

Clark, Peter, The English Alehouse (1983)

Richardson, A. £., and Eberlein, H. D., The English Inn, Past

—
and Present (1968) good pictures
Forbes, T. R., "By What Disease or Casualty: The Changing
Face of Death in London," in Health, Medicine, and Mor-
tality in Sixteenth Century England, ed. C. Webster (1979)

Thomas, K., op. cit.

Wolf, A., A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in

the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1950)
Draper, J. W., The Humors arid Shakespeare's Characters (1945)

Stone, Lawrence, "The Educational Revolution in England,"

Past and Present 28 (1964)

Briggs. Julia This Stage-Play World (1983)

Wright, L. B., Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England

(1958)

Spufford, Margaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981)

Meyer, A. O., England and the Catholic Church under Queen

'Elizabeth (1967 edn.)

Chew, Samuel, The Crescent and the Rose (1937)

Harrison, G. B., The Elizabethan Journals (1955), for 28 Feb-

ruar\' 1596

Lee and Onions, op. cit.

Rye, W. B., op. cit.

ADDITIONAL RECOMMENDATIONS
Hurstfield, J., and Smith, A.G.R.. Elizabethan People (1972)
— an antholog\' of contemporary writings on the age
Wilson, John Dover, Life in Shakespeare's England (1968)—
contemporary writings
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 195

Chapter 2: The Renaissance

GENERAL
Briggs, Julia, This Stage-Play World (1983)

Rowse, A. L., The Elizabethan Renaissance (1972)

Neale, J. E. Neale, Essays in Elizabethan History (1958)

THE BESTSELLER LIST

Einstein, L., The Italian Renaissance in England (1902)
Rowse, A. L., op. cit.

Stone, op. cit. on education

WHICH WAY IS UP?

Wolf, A., op. cit.

Miller, H. H., Captaim of Devon (1985)

[p. 20] Samuel Purchas, quoted in Miller, op. cit.

Hakluvt, Richard, Vovages and Discoveries , J. Beeching ed.

(1972)

Dodd, A. H., "Mr. Mvddelton the Merchant of Tower Street",

in S. T. Bindoff,"j. Hurstfield, C. H. Williams, ed., Eliza-
bethan Government and Society: Essaxs Presented to Sir
John Neale {\96\)
Chew, Samuel, op. cit.

A MIGHTY FORTRESS
Mever, A. O., England and the Catholic Church under Elizabeth
0967)
[p. 23] in Meyer, op. cit.

McGrath, Patrick, Papists and Puritans Under Elizabeth / (1967)

Colhnson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967)

Smith, Lacv Baldwin, Elizabeth Tudor, Portrait of a Queen
"
(1975)

[p. 24] the deposition of Henn- Barrow, in "The Egerton Pa-

pers," Camden Society Publications #12 (1840)
196 SHAKESPEARE ALIVTE!

Pritchard, Arnold, Catholic Loyalisni in England (1979)

[p. 25] quoted in "The Egerton Papers," op. cit.

[p. 25] quoted in Meyer, op. cit.

Morris, J. Allen, Richard Topcliffe: "A Most Humble Pursui-

vant of Her Majesty" (1964)
i
Stenton, D. M., The Englishwoman in History (1957)

[p. Thomas, Keith, "Age and Authority in Early Modem

26] in
England," Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976)

A MOST EXCELLENT AND PERFECT ORDER?

Briggs, op. cit.

Fletcher, A., and Stevenson, J., Order and Disorder in Early

Modem England (1985)

[p. 27] "Homily on Obedience," quoted in A. F. Kinney, Eliz-

abethan Backgrounds (1975) (three quotations)

[p. 28] Act of Apparel, in Camden Society Publications #12

(1840)

[p. 28] Stubbes, Philip, op. cit.

Tillyard, E. M. W., The Elizabethan World Picture (1943)

Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World (1983)

James, Mervyn, "English Politics and the Concept of Honor,"

in Society, Politics, and Culture (1986)
[p. 31] Sir Thomas Elyot, "Book Named the Governor," in
Kinney, op. cit.

Chapter 3: Superstition and The

Supernatural
Sullivan, George, Sports Supers tit iom (1978), for anecdote
about the black cat at the baseball game
Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)

[p. 33] Scot, Reginald, The Discovery of Witchcraft ed. , Mon-

tague Summers (1930)
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 197

[p. 33] in Thomas, K., op. cit.

Hill, Christopher, "Plebeian Irreligion in Seventeenth Cen-

turv'England," in Stiidien iiberdie Revolution, ed. M. Kos-
sok(1969)

[p. 33] Hill, op. cit.

[p. 34] in Dickens, A. G., Lollards and Protestants in the Dio-

cese of York, 1509-1558 (1959)

Monter, E. W., Ritual, M\th, and Magic in Early Modern Eu-

rope (1984)

[p. 35] Thomas, op. cit.

Scot, op. cit.

STAR-STRUCK

Allen. D. C, The Star-Crossed Renaissance (1941)

Sondheim, M., "Shakespeare and the Astrology of His Time,"
Journal of the Warburg Institute ii (1939)

Stone, W. B., "Shakespeare and the Sad Augurs," Journal of

English and Germanic Philology Hi (1953)

Tillyard, op. cit.

Briggs, K. M., The Anatomy of Puck (1959)

[p. 36] Digges, Leonard, Prognostication . . . forever (Old Ash-
molean Reprint, 1926)
Rowse, A. L., The Elizabethan Renaissance (1972)

[p. 39] Digges, op. cit.

GHOST-BUSTED
Thomas, op. cit.

[p. 39] Nashe, Thomas, "The Terrors of the Night," in The

Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane
(1971)

StoU, E. E., "The Objectivity of Ghosts in Shakespeare," Pro-

ceedings of the Modern language Association xxii (1907)
1 98 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

FAIRY-TAILED

Briggs, K. M., The Anatomy of Puck (1959)

Latham, M. W., The Elizabethan Fairies (1930)

Packer, Alison, Fairies in Legends and in the Arts (1980)

[p. 41] Scot, op. cit.

SPELL-BOUND
Scot, Reginald, The Discovery of Witchcraft, ed. Montague
Summers (1930)

Thomas, op. cit.

[p. 43] Scot, op. cit.

Ewen, C. L. Witchcraft and Demonianism (1933)

[p. 43] Ewen, op. cit.

[p. 44] Scot, op. cit.

Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (1956)

[p. 45] episode in Ewen, op. cit.

[p. 45] episode in Kittredge, op. cit.

[p. 46] remedy in Scot, op. cit.

HOUSE CALLS
Thomas, op. cit.

Rowse, op. cit.

[p. 47] Kittredge, op. cit. for headache remedy #1 and warts
solution

[p. 47] Scot, op. cit. for headache remedy #2

[p. 47] Scot, op. cit.

Chapter 4: Foreigners
AND immigrants
Hunter, G. K., "Elizabethans and Foreigners," in Dramatic
Identities and Cultural Tradition (1978)
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 199

[p. 48] Rye, W. B., England as seen by Foreigners (1865),

Emanuel van Meteren's comment
[p. 48-9] John Stow, in F. M. Wilson, Thex Came as Strangers
(1959)

[p. 49] Rathgeb, Duke of Wurtemburg's secretan', quoted in

F.M. Wilson, Strange Island: Britain through Foreign Eves
1395-1940(1955)
Meyer, op. cit.

[p. 50] Lady Russell, quoted in D. M. Stenton, The English-

woman in History (1957)

Duffy, M., The Englishman and the Foreigner (1986)

[p. 51] Nashe, Thomas, Pierce Permiless His Supplicatiofi to

the Dex'il, in Steane, op. cit.

[p. 52] quoted in Georgiana Hill, op. cit. (1896)

TURNING TURK
Chew, Samuel, op. cit.

[p. 53] Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Tiirkes,

in Chew, op. cit.
Homiker, A. L., "William Harbome and Anglo-Turkish Re-
lations", Journal of Modem History xiv (3) (1942)

Baumer, F. L. "England, the Turks, and the Common Corps

oi ChrisXQndom," American Historical Review 1 (1944-5)

[p. 53] in Baumer, op. cit.

OUT OF AFRICA
Little, K., Negroes in Britain (1972)

Miller, W. E., Notes and Queries 8 (1961), "Negroes in Eliz-

abethan London"
Jones, Eldred, ibid., on evidence of Africans in Elizabethan
England
[p. 54] Jones, op. cit

Tokson, Elliot, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English

Drama (1982)
 !

200 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

[p. 56] Scot, Reginald, op. cit.

Jones, Eldred, The Elizabethan Image of Africa (1971)

George, K., "The Civilized West Looks at Primitive Africa,"

his 49(1958)

[p. 57] John Lok, quoted in Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries,

op. cit.

Chew, op. cit.

JOINING THE JEWS

Roth, Cecil, The History of the Jews in England (1941)

Wolf, Lucien, "Jews in Tudor England," Essays in Jewish His-

tory (1934)

"Jews in Elizabethan England," Transactions of the

Jeunsh Historical Society of England xi (1926), including
the quotation from the Spanish prisoner on Jews' obser-
vance of rites in London

Sisson, C. J., "A Colony of Jews in Shakespeare's England,"

Essays and Studies xxiii (1938)

Cunningham, W., Alien Immigrants to England (1894 repr.

1969)

[p. 58-9] Wolf, "Jews in Elizabethan England," op. cit.

Katz, D., Philosemitism and the Re-admission of the Jews to

England 1603-1655 (1982), chapter one
Times Literary Supplement, May 12, 1950, letter from E. A. B.
Barnard on Lopez' manor house near Stratford
Harrison, G. B., The Elizabethan Journals (1955) for 1594

Camden, William, The Historie of Elizabeth Queen of England

(1630)

ARMADAS AND ARMADOS

Neale, J. E., Queen Elizabeth (1934)
Duffy, op. cit.

Meyer, A. O., op. cit.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 201

Maltbv, W. S., The Black Legend in England: The Development

of Anti-Spanish Sentiment (1971)

[p. 63] in Maltby, op. cit.

DUTCH TREAT, PETTY FRANCE

Cunningham, W., Alien Immigrants to England (1894 repr.
1969)

[p. 64] in Meyer, A. O., op. cit.

Duffy-, M., op. cit.

Nicolson, C, Strangers to England: Immigration to England

1100-1952(1974)
[p. 65] in Nicolson, op. cit.

[p. 65] John Stow, quoted in F. M. Wilson, They Came As

Strangers (1959)

Tretiak, A., "The Anti-Alien Riots in England," Review of En-

glish Studies V (1929)

Chapter 5: Queen Elizabeth And

The Status Of Women

women's studies
Mahl, M., and Koon, H., The Female Spectator: English Women
Writers Before 1800 (1977)

Hill, Georgiana, Women in English Life (1896)

[p. 69] Hill, op. cit.

Phillips, M., and Tomkinson, W. S., English Women in Life

and Letters (1926)

Hogrefe, P., Women of Action in Tudor England (1977)

[p. 70] Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton, in Hill, op. cit.

Camden, Carroll, The Elizabethan Woman (1952)

[p. 70] Richard Mulcaster, quoted in Camden, op. cit.

[p. 70] quoted in Camden, ibid.

202 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

Notestein, W. "The English Woman 1580-1650", in Studies

in Social History, ed. J. H. Plumb (1955)

[p. 71] in Notestein, op. cit.

Jardine, Lisa, Still Harping on Daughters (1983)

Stenton, D. M., The Englishwoman in History (1957)

[p. 71] quoted in Stenton, op. cit. (all)

women's work
Clark, Alice, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth
Century (1919 repr. 1968)

[p. 72] Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, Book of Husbandry, quoted

in Clark, op. cit.

[p. 72-3] Emmanuel van Meteren in W. B. Rye, England as

Seen by Foreigners (1865)

SECOND-CLASS
Houlbrooke, Ralph, The English Family 1450-1700 (1984)

[p. 73] in Stenton, op. cit.

[p. 74] van Meteren, in Rye, op. cit.

Hogrefe, op. cit.

[p. 74] T. E., The Lawes Resolution of Women's Rights, quoted

in Stenton, op. cit. (three quotations)

[p. 75] Camden, op. cit. (two quotations)

Stubbes, Philip, op. cit.

[p. 75] Stubbes, op. cit.

Henderson, K., and McManus, M., Half Humankind: Contexts

and Texts of the Controversy About Women in England,
1540-1640(1985)

[p. 77] Joseph Swetnam, "The Arraignment of lewd, idle, for-

ward, and unconstant women ," (1615) in Henderson
. . .

and McManus, op. cit. (two quotations)

[p. 77] Esther Sowemam, "Esther hath hanged Haman," (1617)

in Henderson and McManus, op. cit. (two quotations)
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 203

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE THRONE ...

Neale, J. E., Queen Elizabeth (1934)
Heisch, A., "Queen Elizabeth and the Persistence of Patriar-
chy", Feminist Review 4 (1980)
Smith, Lacy Baldwin, Elizabeth Tudor (1975)

[p. 78] Rowse, A. L., The Elizabethan Renaissance (1972),

quotingJ. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments

Levine, Joseph, Elizabeth I (1969)

[p. 79] John Aylmer, quoted in Levine, op. cit.

[p. 79] quoted in Neale, op. cit.

[p. 80] John Knox, quoted in Neale, op. cit.

[p. 81] Neale, op. cit.

[p. 81] quoted in Levine, op. cit.

MacCaffrey, W. "Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Pol-

T.,
itics," in Elizabethan Government and Societv, ed. Bindoff,
etal. (1961)

[p. 82] Rye, op. cit.

Jardine, op. cit.

Strong, Roy, The Cult of Elizabeth (1977)

[p. 83] Neale op. cit.

[p. 83] quoted in Levine, op. cit.

Chapter 6: Family Life

GENERAL
Houlbrooke, Ralph, The English Family J 450- J 700 (1984)
Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England
1500-1800 {\911)
Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (1982)

DEATH COMES a'kNOCKJNG'

Schofield, R. and Wrigley, E. A., "Infant and Child Mortality"
in Health, Medicine and Mortality in Sixteenth Century En-
gland, ed. C. Webster (1979)
204 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

Forbes, Thomas, "By What Disease or Casuahy: The Chang-

ing Face of Death in London", in ibid.

IN THE nurse's ARMS

Maclaren, D., "Marital Fertihty and Lactation 1570-1720,"
in Women in English Society '1500-1800, ed. M. Prior (1985)

[p. 88] quoted in Maclaren, op. cit.

A FIRM BUT LOVING HAND

[p. 88] quoted in Wrightson, op. cit.

[p. 89] in Mahl and Koon, The Female Spectator

[p. 89] Mistress Dorothy Leigh, "The Mother's Blessing," quoted
in Stenton, op. cit. (1957)

Thomas, K., "Age and Authority in Early Modem England,"

Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976)

HALFWAY HOUSE
Smith, S. R., "The London Apprentices," Past and Present 61
(1973)

OUT FROM UNDER

[p. 92] in Stone, op. cit.

THE PARTY'S OVER

Meads, D. M., The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (1930)

[p. 95] in Notestein, op. cit.

[p. 96] quoted in Houlbrooke, op. cit.

Hair, P.E.H., "Bridal Pregnancy," in Population Studies 24

(1970)

Quaife, G. E., Wanton Wenches and Wayw^ard Wives (1969)

Wrightson, K., and Levine, D., "The Social Context of Ille-
gitimacy in Early Modem England," in Bastardy and Its
Comparative History, ed. P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen, and R.
M. Smith (1980)
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 205

Macfarlane, A., "Illegitimacy and Illegitimates in English his-

tory" in ibid.

[p. 98] Stubbes, op. cit.

THE DYNAMIC DUO

[p. 100] Sir Thomas Hoby, in Meads, op. cit.

[p. 1 00] the Earl of Shrewsbury to his wife Bess (of Hardwick)
quoted in Hogrefe, Women of Action in Tudor England
(1977)

Todd, B. J. "The Remarrying Widow: a stereotype reconsid-

ered" in Prior, M. op. cit. (1985)

Chapter 7: The Theatre Is Born

THE WORLD BEFORE THE THEATRE
Bradbrook, M. C, The Rise of the Common Player (1964)

Bevington, D. M., From Mankind to Marlowe (1962)

[p. 108] Hex'wood, Thomas, Apology for Actors (1612) (Schol-
ars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941)

[p. 108] in Bevington, op. cit.

Bradbrook, op. cit.

Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 (1980

edn.)

Schoenbaum, S., William Shakespeare: A Compact Documen-

tary^ Life (1977)

Hosley, Richard, "Playhouses," in J. Leeds Barroll, Alexander

Leggatt, Richard Hoslev, and Alvin Keman, The Revels
History of Drama in English, Vol. 3, 1576-1613 (1975)

THE PLOT HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

Gurr, op. cit.

Hosley, op. cit.

Bevington, D. M., Action is Eloquence (1984)

Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe (1962)
206 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

[p. 112] Thomas Platter (1599), in F. M. Wilson. Strange Is-

land (1955)

[p. 112] Paul Hentzner, Travels, quoted in A. Cohn, Shake-

speare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cen- ^
turies {\S65)

BATTLE LINES DRAWN

Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage (1923). 4 volumes

[p. 1 14] Chambers, op. cit., vol. 4

Gurr, op. cit.

BarroU, "Social and Literary Context," in The Revels History

[p. 1 15] in W. C. Hazlitt, The English Drama and Stage Under ^

the Tudor and Stuart Princes, 1543-1664 (1869) j
Harbage, Alfred, Shakespeare's Audience (1941)

[p. 116] Stubbes, Philip, Anatomy of Abuses; the Reverend

Mr. Spark, in the introduction to Gosson, School of Abuse
(Arber Enghsh Reprint, 1868)

[p. 1 16] the Reverend Willcocks' sermon, 1577, quoted in ibid.

[p. 116-117] Gosson, Stephen, Plays Confuted in Five Actions

(1582, reprinted in Hazlitt, op. cit.); ibid.; Gosson, School
of Abuse, op. cit.; Stubbes, op. cit.; ibid.; The Second and
Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theater (1580, re-
printed in HazHtt op. cit.)

[p. 1 17] sermon by John Stockwood, in introduction to Gos-

son's School of Abuse, op. cit.

[p. 1 18] Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions, op. cit.

[p. 119] ibid.

[p. 1 19] Fynes Monson, quoted in Gurr, The Shakespearean

Stage

[p. 119] quoted in Bradbrook, The Rise of the Common

Plaver
 BIBLIOGR.APHY 207

Chapter 8: The Acting Companies

ORIGINS
Bevington, D. M., From Mankind to Marlowe (1962)

Bradbrook, M. C, op. cit.

DOUBLE TROUBLE
Leggatt, A., "Companies and Actors" in Banoll el al., op. cit.

[p. 123] Chambers, op. cil. Vol. 4

[p. 123] ibid.

[p. 124] ibid.

Gurr, op. cit.

Murray, J. T., English Dramatic Companies 1558-1642 (1910)

Leggatt, op. cit.

Baldwin, T. W., The Orgaiiization and Personnel of the Shake-

spearean Compafiy (1927)

[p. 125] John Stow, Annales, quoted in Bradbrook, op. cit.

Bradbrook, op. cit.

Gurr, op. cit.

Leggatt, in Barroll, op. cit.

[p. 126] Sir E. K. Chambers, op. cit. Volume 2; ibid.

[p. 126] ibid.

A RUNG ON THE LADDER

Gurr, op. cit.

Baldwin, op. cit.

Thomson, P. W., Shakespeare's Theatre (1983)

Bentley, G. E., op. cit.

Jamieson, M., "Shakespeare's Celibate Stage," in The Seven-

teenth Century' Stage, ed. G. E. Bentley (1968)

[p. 128] Thomas Coryat, quoted in Jamieson, op. cit.

208 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

DOUBLE THE FUN

[p. 129] Thomas Platter, quoted in Harbage, op. cit.

Chambers, op. cit. Vol. 2 and 4

Beckerman, op. cit.

Leggatt, in BarroU, op. cit.

Thomson, op. cit.

[p. 131] quoted in Schoenbaum, op. cit.

GLOBAL DIMENSIONS
Baldwin, op. cit.

Gurr, op. cit.

Leggatt, op. cit.

Beckerman, op. cit.

Beckerman, op. cit.

Gurr, op. cit.

[p. 135] Cohn, A., op. cit.

Brennecke, E., Shakespeare in Germany 1590-1700 (1964)

[p. 135] MoPy'son, quoted in Gurr, op. cit.

Chapter 9: Playwright And Audience

WIELDING THE PEN
Bentley, G. E., The Profession of the Dramatist in Shake-
speare's Time (1971)

[p. 136] Foakes, R., Henslowe's Diary (1977 + )

Baldwin, op. cit.

Gurr, op. cit.

[p. 139] Thomas Heywood, preface to The English Traveller,

quoted Arthur Brown, "The Printing of Books," Shake-
in
speare Survey 17 (1964)

[p. 139] ibid.

 BIBLIOGR-APHY 209

Bevington, D. M., Action Is Eloquence (1984)

WITH PATIENT EARS

Bevington, D. M., From Mankind to Marlowe (1962)

Gurr, op. cit.

Harbage, Shakespeare's Audience (1941)

BarroU, "Social and Literan Context," in Barroll, et al.,

op. cit.

[p. 142] Gosson, op. cit.

[p. 143] quoted in Harbage, op. cit.

[p. 143] Henr\' Crosse, 1603, quoted in Harbage

Bradbrook, op. cit.

[p. 144] Harbage, op. cit.

[p. 144] Gosson, op. cit.

Weimann, Robert, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in

the Theatre (1978)

Chapter 10: Producing a Play

Baldwin, op. cit.

Greg, W. W., Dramatic Documents

Gurr, op. cit.

Bentlev, The Profession of the Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time

(1971)
Barroll, "Social and Literar>' Context," in Barroll et al.,

op. cit.

[p. 147] in Barroll, op. cit.

Harbage, Theatre for Shakespeare (1955)

[p. 149] Nashe, "Summer's Last Will and Testament" in Steane,

op. cit.

Armstrong, W. A., "Actors and Theatres," Shakespeare Survey

17 (1964)
 !

2 1 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

Klein, David, "Did Shakespeare Produce His Own Plays?",

Modem Language Review Ivii (1962)

[p. 149] in Klein, op. cit.

Leggatt, in Barroll, et al., op. cit.

Dessen, Allen, Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer's Eye (1977)

Bevington, D. M., Action is Eloquence (1984)

Foakes, op. cit.

[p. 151] Thomas Platter, quoted in Gurr

Marker, Lise-Lone, "Nature and Decorum in the Theory of
Elizabethan Acting," in The Elizabethan Theatre 2, ed. Gal-
loway (1970)
Gurr, Andrew, "Elizabethan Action," Studies in Philology Ixiii

(1966)

Hunter, G. K., "Flatcaps and Bluecoats: Visual Signals on the

Elizabethan Stage," Essays and Studies n.s. 3 (1980)

Weimann, op. cit.

Chapter 1 1 : Sources and Resources

Shakespeare's reading list
Bullough, G., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare
(1957), several volumes
Muir, K., Shakespeare's Sources (1977)

Hunter, G. K., "Seneca and the Elizabethans", in Dramatic

Identities and Cultural Tradition (1978)

Jones, Emrys, The Origins of Shakespeare (1977)

Hunter, G. K., "Shakespeare's Reading," in K. Muir, and S.

Schoenbaum, A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies
(1971)

Wilson, F. P. "Shakespeare's Reading," Shakespeare Survey 3

(1950)

Doran, Madeline, Endeavors of Art (1956)

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 211

Thomson, J.A.K., Shakespeare and the Classics (1966 [1952])

Spencer, T.J.B., "Shakespeare and Elizabethan Romans,"

Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957)

Walker, A., "The Reading of an Elizabethan," Review of En-

glish Studies viii (1932)

[p. 155] quoted in Walker, op. cit.

Thomson, op. cit.

Smith, B. R., "Seneca on the Renaissance Sidi^Q," Renaissance

Drama 9(1978)
Root, R. K., Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (1965 [1903])

Thomson, op. cit.

Doran, op. cit.

BIBUCAL BREEZES
Noble, R., Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (1935)

Milward, P., Biblical Influences in Shakespeare's Great Trage-

dies (1987)

TRAGICAL-POETICAL

Bullough, op. cit. (used in all subsequent sections)

Muir, op. cit.

Brooke, A., The Tragicall History ofRomeus and Juliet (1562)

TRAGICAL-HISTORICAL

Smallwood, R. L., "Shakespeare's Use of History," in The

Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. S. Wells
(1986)

Hosley, R., Shakespeare's Holinshed (1968)

TRAGICAL-PLUTARCHAL
Hunter, G. K., op. cit.

Spencer, T.J.B., Shakespeare's Plutarch (1964)

 2 !

21 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

Chapter 12: English as a

Foreign Language

LENDING HIM OUR EARS

Brook, G. L., The Language of Shakespeare (1976)
Ewbank, Inga-Stina, "Shakespeare and the Arts of Language,"
in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed.
Wells (1986)
Joseph, Sister Miriam, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Lan-
guage (1947)
,Rhetoric in Shakespeare's Time (1962)
Blake, N. F., Shakespeare's Language: An Introduction (1983)

Hussey, S. S., The Literary Language of Shakespeare (1982)

[p. 165] George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie in

English Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith (1904), Vol. 1
Vickers, B., "Shakespeare's Use of Rhetoric," in K. Muir
and S. Schoenbaum, A New Companion to Shakespeare
Studies (1971)

Wilson, F. P., "Shakespeare and the Diction of Common Life,"

in Shakespearian and Other Studies, ed. Helen Gardner,
(1969)

Mahood, M. M., Shakespeare's Wordplay (1965)

Byrne, Muriel St. Clare, "The Foundations of the Elizabethan
Language," Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964)

FROM GOOD TO VERSE

Abbott, E. A., A Shakespearian Grammar (1966 [1870])

Brook, op. cit.

Blake, op. cit.

Doran, Shakespeare's Dramatic Language (1976)

CROSSING THE BORDER

Abbott, op. cit.

Blake, op. cit.

 —
BIBLIOGRAPHY 213

Brook, op. cit.

Quirk, R., "Shakespeare and the EngUsh Language," in Muir

and Schoenbaum, op. cit.

Willcock, G. D., "Shakespeare and Elizabethan EngUsh,"

Shakespeare Survey 7 (1954)

[p. 171] all quotations from Elizabethan authors John Cheke, —

George Gascoigne, Thomas Wilson, and Thomas Elyot
in Sir William Craigie, The Critique of Pure English from
Caxton to Smollett (1946)

[p. 172] Richard Carew, "The Excellency of the English

Tongue," in G. G. Smith, op. cit.

[p. 172] Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors (1612)

Brook, op. cit.

Ewbank, op. cit.

Blake, op. cit.

Onions, C. T., A Shakespeare Glossary (1919; revised R. D.

Eagleson, 1986)

Wilson, F. P., op. cit.

Chapter 13: Shakespeare Alive?

GLOBE-TROTTER
Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for the Year
ended 31 December 1982, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Brown, L, This Shakespeare Industry (1939)

Zbierski, H., "Shakespeare in Poland," Theatre Review 2 (1960)

National Library, Calcutta, Shakespeare in India (1964)

Samarin, R., and Nikolyukin, A., Shakespeare in the Soviet

Union (1966)
Klajn, H., "Shakespeare in Yugoslavia," Shakespeare Quarterly
5 (1954)

Sideris, Joannis, "Shakespeare in Greece," Theatre Review 6,

no. 2 (1964)
 4

2 1 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE!

Harvvood, Gina, "Shvlock in Zanzibar," Spectator, June 1,

1934

And, Metin, "Shakespeare in Turkey," Theatre Review 6,

no. 2 (1964)

Fluchere, Henri, "Shakespeare in France 1900-1948," Shake-

speare Survey 2 (1949)

Fernando, Guido, "Shakespeare in Italy," Shakespeare Asso-

ciation Bulletin 5 (1930)

Kawatake, Toshio, "Shakespeare in the Japanese Theatre,"

Theatre Review 2 (1960)

Kynge, J., "Shakespeare in China," Plays and Players (1986)

[p. 178] quoted in Fernando, op. cit.

Gibian, George, "Shakespeare in Soviet Russia," Russian Re-

view 1 1 (1952) for Karl Marx comment

[p. 178] Fluchere, op. cit.

[p. 178] quoted in Kynge, op. cit.

[p. 179] quoted from R. G. Shahani, Shakespeare Through

Eastern Eyes (1932), in J. P. Mishra, Shakespeare's Impact
on Hindi Literature (1936)
Sisson, C. J., Shakespeare in India, 1926

Conklin, P., A History of Hamlet Criticism (1947)

Simmons, E. J., English Literature and Culture in Russia, (1964)

Fluchere, op. cit.

Alexander, E., "Shakespeare's Plays in Armenia," Shakespeare

Quarterly 9 (1958)

TRANSATLANTIC SHAKESPEARE
Falk, Robert, "Shakespeare in America to 1900," Shakespeare
Survey 18(1967)

Willoughby, E. E., "The Reading of Shakespeare in Colonial

America," Papers of the Bibliographical Societx of America
xxxi(1937)

Dunn, E. C, Shakespeare in America (1939)

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 215

[p. 180] quoted in Dunn, op. cit.

Berkelman, R., "Lincoln's Interest in Shakespeare," Shake-

speare Quarterly 2 (1951)

[p. 180] quoted in Moses C. Tyler, The Literaiy History of the

American Revohition (1900), Vol. 2
[p. 180] quoted in Dunn, op. cit.

Shattuck, C. H., Shakespeare on the American Stage (1976)

Gale, C, Shakespeare on the American Stage in the Eighteenth

Centun' (1948)

VERSIONS AND REVERSIONS

Dean, W., "Shakespeare in the Opera House," Shakespeare
Survey 18 (1965)
Hill, E., Shakespeare in Sable (1984)
Cohn, R., Modem Shakespeare Offshoots (1976)
Wells, Stanley, ed., Nineteenth Century Shakespeare Bur-
lesques (1978), in five volumes
[p. 184] in Wells, op. cit.

[p. 185] John Brougham, Much Ado About a Merchant of

Venice (1868) in Wells, op. cit.

Manvell, R., Shakespeare and the Film (1979)

Morris, P., Shakespeare on Film (1972)

PERVERSIONS ON THE ENGLISH STAGE

Odell, G. C, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving (1935), two
volumes
[p. 186] Nahum Tate, preface to his King Lear (1678)

Spencer, H., Shakespeare Improx'ed: Restoration Versiofis (1927)

[p. 186] Tate, op. cit.

Johnson, Charles, Love in a Forest (1723)

[p. 187] from the Hiram Stead Collection, New York Public
Library
Nalley, Sara, "Shakespeare on the Charleston Stage, 1764-
1799," in Shakespeare in the South, ed. Kolin (1983)
 6 !

21 SHAKESPEARE ALIVE

[p. 187] quoted in Odell, op. cit. Vol. 1

David, Richard, Shakespeare in the Theatre (1978)

Sprague, A. C, Shakespearian Players and Performances (1953)

AND TODAY?
Babula, W., Shakespeare in Production J 935-78 (1981)
Cohn, R. op. cit.

"International Round-up" in Shakespeare Sur\'ey 18

,

(1965)

Hill, E., op. cit.

, London Theatre Record Vol. 5, Issue 5, Feb. 27-Mar.

12 for Shrew reviews
Lawrence, W. i., Actresses in Male Shakespearean Roles ( 1901 )

SHAKESPEARE ALFVE!
[p. 190] quoted in Lucy Collison-Morley, Shakespeare in Italy
(1916, repr. 1967)

[p. 190] Morgann, M., An Essay on the Dramatic Character of

Sir John Fabtaff {Mil), ed. W. A. Gill (1969)

Clarke, M. C, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (1880)

Trader, G. H., Shakespeare's Daughters (1910)

[p. 192] Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 1905, quoted in Shake-

speare in Europe, ed. O. LeWinter (1963)
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