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Shakespeare the Player

A Life in the Theatre

The History Press

The Invisible Man

The eyes that stare blankly out at us from the familiar Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare have little to tell us of the player that he was – or indeed of the man, however we choose to regard him. This should not surprise us. The artist's depiction of his features must have borne a reasonable likeness or it would not have been passed by Shakespeare's former fellows, Heminges and Condell, for inclusion in the First Folio of 1623, which they edited; but Droeshout had been only fifteen when Shakespeare died in 1616 and he is unlikely to have known him well, if at all. He had probably based his engraving on an earlier portrait or sketch and, if so, whatever life the original may have had was lost in the copying.

But in fairness to Droeshout, we should bear in mind what Heminges and Condell's purpose had been in commissioning the portrait, which was to embellish a first collected edition of their friend's plays with an appropriately dignified image of their author. Shakespeare's renown as player and man of the theatre was not in question – not among those who had known him personally or had seen him perform; his reputation as dramatic poet was yet to be established. Seven years earlier in a bid to secure scholarly recognition for his own dramatic achievements, Ben Jonson had published his plays in a similarly impressive folio volume, which may have prompted Heminges and Condell to do the same for their former fellow. As they explain in their prefatory letters, the Shakespeare folio was intended as both memorial and rescue mission: 'to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our SHAKESPEARE'; but also because whereas before 'you [the readers] were abus'd with deverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious imposters, that expos'd them: even those are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect in their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them'. (The 'rest', it should be said, comprised no less than eighteen plays that had never before appeared in print, including The Tempest, Twelfth Night and Macbeth, which, but for Heminges and Condell's initiative in searching out Shakespeare's manuscripts and the company's prompt books, might easily, probably would, have been lost for ever.) But, like Jonson, they would also have had a larger end in view. For the paradox is that at the highest point of their achievement in the English dramatic renaissance of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the status of playwrights had never been so low, or plays so little regarded as a literary form.

In 1605, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, the proudly assertive Jonson, committed to prison with George Chapman for their part in the writing of a play called Eastward Ho! that had given offence to the authorities, was so far obliged to bow to the common opinion as to write cringingly to the Earl of Salisbury that the cause of their incarceration – '(would I could name some worthier) ... is, a (the word irks me that our Fortunes hath necessitated us to so despised a course) a play, my Lord'. In founding his now famous Oxford library in the years that followed, Sir Thomas Bodley was insistent on excluding plays from the newly published books that he wished to assemble on its shelves. Writing to the Bodleian's librarian in 1611/12, Sir Thomas assures him that even if 'some little profit might be reaped (which God knows is very little) out of some of our playbooks, the benefit thereof will nothing near countervail the harm that the scandal will bring unto the library when it shall be given out that we stuff it full of baggage books ...'. In another letter, he puts playbooks in the same category of ephemera as almanacs and proclamations, and refers to them collectively as 'riff-raffs'. The 'baggage books' and 'riff-raffs' he thus dismisses as unworthy of attention would have included newly published quarto editions of plays by both Shakespeare and Jonson. Even so cultured and frequent a playgoer as the poet John Donne, writing in 1604 or 1605 (years in which Hamlet and Othello were in performance at the Globe), does not even mention Shakespeare's name or that of any other dramatist in a catalogue of thirty-four works by thirty different authors of the time. As Professor Bentley concludes, 'he did not consider plays in the category of serious literature'. Nor even, it would appear, of literature at all in the usual sense. Though Shakespeare the player, Shakespeare the theatre director and part-owner, would certainly have been known to him, Shakespeare the playwright and dramatic poet was seemingly invisible to him.

Plays of the period were, of course, written to be performed: heard, not read. Throughout the whole of the seventeenth century – and in spite of first Jonson's, then Heminges and Condell's, best editorial endeavours – plays continued to be primarily regarded not as books and thus belonging to literature, but as public events in which a story was enacted by means of spoken words and the movement and gestures of actors on a stage to an audience assembled at a particular time and place. They existed temporally – in the two to three hours' traffic of the stage – not spatially in the way that a book exists and can be handled and shelved. In the theatre, the words were of great importance; at no period of theatrical history have they been of more importance (one went to hear a play, not see it); but they were written by their author to be memorised by actors, and came into their true, intended form only when spoken. We need to remember, too, that Shakespeare was one of those actors; he was writing for himself as a performer as well as for his fellows.

In this respect, the medium in which Shakespeare and other dramatists of the period worked – that of the popular theatre – had continuity with, and was itself an almost unique survival of, the age-old oral culture that had been dominant throughout the Middle Ages. By Shakespeare's time that popular culture of the harper-poets and itinerant interluders was in rapid disintegration and retreat before the advance of literacy and an increasing availability of printed books; a profound shift in the cultural climate that had been in slow, inexorable progress since the fourteenth century but was then brought to a critical stage by more recent religious changes. The Bible – previously reserved as reading matter to a Latin-speaking elite and communicated to an illiterate laity in the form of pictorial images, liturgical ritual and religious drama (all providing an essentially communal experience) – now became in its English translations generally available and subject to individual interpretation. The altar, where an action was performed and a sacrifice offered, gave place in importance to the pulpit, from which the scriptures were read and expounded, and to the chained Bible which people were encouraged to read for themselves – an essentially private act. In the religious compromise effected by the Elizabethan church settlement, the Eucharist survived, but more perhaps as a service to be read than as an action to be done, with the altar replaced by a removable table. The great Corpus Christi cycles of plays, that had survived long enough for Shakespeare to have seen at least one of them at Coventry, did not simply fall out of favour, as was once believed, but were actively suppressed in the interests of the new Protestant orthodoxy by an alliance of secular and ecclesiastical powers that within thirty years of Shakespeare's death was to close and demolish the theatres. So far as the medium of Shakespeare's expression was concerned, it was an end-game that he and his fellows were playing.

Shakespeare's plays (and those of his fellow dramatists) were no more written for publication than were the Corpus Christi cycles or later morality plays and interludes, and their survival as texts was to prove just as chancy. Not only were they aimed at performance, rather than publication, but their publication was, in most circumstances, firmly resisted by the companies for which they had been written, including the Chamberlain's (later, King's) Men, in which Shakespeare became a sharer. This was because, in the absence of any enforceable copyright other than that of the stationers who printed them, the effect of such publication was to make the texts of the plays freely available for performance by rival companies to the financial loss of those who had commissioned and first performed them. (The plays belonged, not to the author, but to the company. Hence the importance of the playbook, and the book-keeper who was responsible for it.) Nevertheless, as we know, some of Shakespeare's more popular plays did find their way into print during his lifetime, for the most part in pirated editions, 'maimed and deformed', as Heminges and Condell put it, 'by the frauds and stealthes of injurious imposters', and it was in response to that specific situation that they had mounted their rescue mission. In normal circumstances, only when a play was thought to have exhausted its immediate potential in the theatre and had been dropped from the current repertoire was its publication authorised by the company concerned as a disposable capital asset.

But there was another, more telling reason for Shakespeare having remained invisible to so many of his contemporaries. It was not just the ephemerality of the medium in which he worked or the low status accorded to dramatists among other authors, but a deep-seated disdain on the part of the educated and armorial classes of his day, especially the literati among them, for all those who, like himself and his fellows, earned their living in the realm of public entertainment, whether as musicians, actors or playwrights. Quite simply, they were regarded as 'below the salt', to be patronised perhaps, but otherwise excluded from respectable society. Here was the real source of that discredit which Bodley believed would reflect upon his new library by the admittance of playbooks – irrespective of their quality. It was embodied in the vagrancy laws of the period where minstrels and players were routinely cited together as 'rogues and vagabonds', subject to a whipping if caught on the road without the protection afforded by their acceptance of a nominal, but nonetheless menial, status as servants of the monarch or other great lord. Quite apart from the extreme views of Puritans such as Stubbs and Gosson, for whom acting itself was an offence against God, and players the 'Devil's brood', such attitudes were a commonplace of moderate contemporary opinion.

Once, it may have been otherwise. 'Plaier', John de la Casa admits in 1615, 'was ever the life of dead poesie, and in those times, that Philosophy taught us morall precepts [he means the classical era], these acted the same in publicke showes'; but 'Player is now a name of contempt, for times corrupt men with vice, and vice is growne to a height of government'; for 'Players, Poets, and Parasites', he goes on, 'doe now in a man joyne hands [in Shakespeare? In Marlowe and Jonson, who at one time had also been players?]; and as Lucifer fell from heaven through pride: these have fallen from credit through folly: so that to chast eares they are as odious as filthy pictures are offensive to modest eyes'.

Here, perhaps, are those 'public means which public manners breeds' referred to by Shakespeare himself in Sonnet 111:

    Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
    And almost thence my nature is subdued
    To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

Or, as Shakespeare's friend and admirer, John Davies of Hereford, was to bluntly express it in 1603, 'the stage doth staine pure gentle bloud'. The same snobbish disdain for the occupation of player was to fester on until comparatively recent times.

The publication of the First Folio was not only, then, a work of fellowly piety to preserve the text of Shakespeare's plays and rescue them from the pirates; it also implied a claim for recognition of his genius as a dramatic poet, which, seven years after his death, remained largely unacknowledged. And the engraving Heminges and Condell commissioned Droeshout to make for it was designed to promote a reformed image of Shakespeare as poet and man of letters in circumvention of the contemporary prejudice against him as public entertainer. In the immediate term, their efforts met with only limited success; but, as the book found its way into libraries (the earliest reference is to a copy bound by the Bodleian in 1624), it was to light a long fuse to an explosion of scholarly interest and a still-thriving academic industry – all centred, naturally enough, on the plays as literary texts. It is the Droeshout engraving – the only authenticated, contemporary portrait we possess – that has dominated the imagination of the book's users ever since.

The Droeshout engraving is immediately followed in the First Folio by Ben Jonson's tribute to his dead colleague and friend and, as if in acknowledgement of its limitations, the reader is urged by him to 'look/Not on his picture, but his book'.

The memorial bust of Shakespeare in Stratford church (of uncertain date but installed by 1623 at the latest) reinforces this message. (See Plate 2.) Beneath a carving of the now familiar figure, holding a quill in his right hand and resting his left on a sheet of paper, the passer-by is enjoined to stay, and

    READ IF THOU CANST, WHOM ENVIOUS DEATH HATHPLAST,
    WITH IN THIS MONUMENT SHAKSPEARE: WITHWHOME,
    QUICK NATURE DIDE: WHOSE NAME DOTH DECK YSTOMBE,
    FAR MORE THEN COST: SIEH ALL, YT HE HATHWRITT,
    LEAVES LIVING ART, BUT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.

The inscription is misspelt and over-punctuated; nor does Shakespeare lie 'with in this monument' but under the floor of the church some yards away, but its purport is identical to that of Jonson's epitaph. If we seek the soul of Shakespeare, his 'living art', we have nowhere left to look but to the pages of his book; in that time and place, the theatre was not considered an acceptable option.

A long succession of biographers and scholars have since applied this advice in the most literal way by searching the speeches of the fictional characters he created, and the changing themes of his plays, for clues to Shakespeare's inner, emotional life, or his political and religious opinions. The method is not altogether without interest or value; but the material available to this kind of research is so large and so various that, like the Bible, it can be used selectively to support a multiplicity of contradictory views. So prone is it to subjective bias that all too often the portrait that emerges is found to be more reflective of the researchers' own preconceptions and prejudices, and of the values and assumptions of the period in which they are writing, than it is of Shakespeare; these look for Shakespeare in the mirror of his book and see only a cloudy image of themselves. In so far as such enquiries proceed from a belief that in writing his plays Shakespeare was primarily engaged in a form of self-expression, rather than in responding to the practical needs of the theatres he served and the changing demands and tastes of the public with whom he was in constant touch in the most intimate way possible – as an actor on the stage – they rest on a fallacious premise. This is not to deny that, like all great poets and writers, Shakespeare was able to mould whatever material came his way to an aesthetic expression of his own unique experience of life and of the world around him, or to do so in words that at their finest and best reach to universal truths; but, by definition, such intuitive insights are not to be found on the surface of his mimetic inventions; and unless we start from a true appreciation of his initial motivations in putting pen to paper, of choosing one theme, one treatment of a theme, one story rather than another, and always with a particular end in view – a play for a specific group of actors to perform in a specific theatre at a specific time that would give pleasure to a specific audience – we go badly astray. In search of his 'living art', we discover only a life. And is it really Shakespeare's?

Those unwilling or unable to accept the plain fact of his profession as player, or its necessary implications, have found 'evidence' for a whole series of alternative occupations to fill the so-called 'lost years' of his youth and early manhood: schoolmaster, soldier, sailor, butcher, glover, dyer, scrivener, lawyer, barber-surgeon – nothing is too far-fetched if it can serve to postpone the moment of his emergence, 'exelent in the qualitie he professes', as player. Others would avoid that moment of truth altogether by attributing the plays to some other contemporary figure considered to be more fitted by birth and education to be their author. Sir Francis Bacon, the earls of Rutland, Derby, Southampton and Oxford have been among the leading contenders for the coveted title. The mystery these set out to solve is of their own making, and the effect of their conjectures merely to muddy the waters of genuine research.

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Excerpted from Shakespeare the Player by John Southworth. Copyright © 2011 John Southworth. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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