Shakespeare: A Life (52 page)

problems) and though that need not be a sign of physical debility he was unlikely to have the duties of a
'Johannesfac totum'
any longer.
¹⁹
His working life had been hard; profits had accumulated, and, having
inherited his father's properties and made new investments, he did not
lack money. He was comfortably off. In London, as will be seen, he
was in touch with a fascinating network of immigrants and with a few
of their descendants, among other people outside the theatre; and he
was living in the north of the city, not quite so close to fellow
sharers as is generally supposed. If he did not as yet mean to quit
London, he evidently welcomed a relief from rehearsals. After acting
in Jonson
Sejanus ( 1603)
, it is likely that he appeared on
stage less often, rather than not at all, and that he hoped to compose
without tight restraints of time. In the main he had deflected envy,
avoided trouble with rivals, and relied on a close, hierarchical
fraternity which he tried to abet; it may be that we see his implicit
criticism of the fraternity of actors even better in
Othello
than in
Hamlet
.
But in any case, his loyalty to his troupe can hardly be questioned.
An expansion in personnel is no sign that his own obligation
increased; and an elegant script from him each year would have kept up
their prestige.

Since the accession,
romantic comedies had fallen out of fashion: satires, tragedies and
tragicomedies were in vogue. He seldom left a genre quite behind, and
Measure for Measure
,
which is more comic than tragic, advances beyond any rival play in
its psychological depth. He turns to an Italian novella by Geraldi
Cinthio which had been used in George Whetstone's crowded, two-part
Elizabethan play Promos and Cassandra. Taking details from Cinthio and
adapting from Whetstone's comic sub-plot, he imagines modern London
in ' Vienna', so that one might be about 200 yards from Bankside's
Globe in scene ii. His plays were staged near alleys of enterprise,
though the alleys' profits were never sure. 'What with the war', cries
poor Mistress Overdone of the bordello trade, 'what with the sweat,
what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk' (1.
ii. 80-2). From what would be a Londoner's viewpoint, she refers to
the overseas war, to 'sweat' or the plague, to treason trials at
Winchester, and to a shrinking of custom in the almost deserted capital
around the autumn of 1603. Shakespeare, in most respects, is less

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exotic -- here and elsewhere -- than Middleton, Marston, or Webster tend to be.

In the first act he sketches figures who quickly lead to an
impasse-young Claudio, terrified and condemned to death for getting his
betrothed lover with child; a correct Angelo, Deputy of Vienna, who
succumbs to lust; and a jejune and fiery Isabella, novitiate of the
order of St Clare, who craves moral rectitude and rather than sleep
with Angelo would let her brother Claudio die. Manœuvring among them
all is Vienna's godlike Duke, who absents himself only to return in
disguise as a friar, while reminding one sometimes of the monarch of
precepts in King James's book Basilikon Doron (a source for the play).

Rather like England's Stuart king,
the Duke rules by divine right, admits to prior leniency as a
governor, and distrusts crowds -- 'I love the people', he claims,

But do not like to stage me to their eyes.
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and
aves
vehement.

(1. i. 67-70)

So James might have felt on 15 March. But Duke Vincentio of Vienna is
oddly vulnerable. He is embarrassed and inconvenienced; he is upset
by Lucio's slanders, or again by the murderer Barnardine's
unwillingness to be put to death in prison because he has a hangover,
with the result that his severed head cannot be sent to Angelo in place
of Claudio's head. Such details suggest a playwright dissatisfied with
his earlier comic dramaturgy and seeking a better analysis of social
malaise. Shakespeare is set apart from other dramatists by his ability
to give the utmost eloquence to each person in turn, but also, and
just as much, by his special kind of social realism. His characters
are marshalled not to satirize human society but to unveil it, and here
he ranges over abstract issues of government which appear to involve
his attitudes to British towns as well as to London. Angelo's corrupt
righteousness might have infected Stratford, where a narrow Puritan
clique influenced the council and where, as in other towns, sermons
were replacing dramas and other 'obscene' entertainments.
²⁰

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Measure for Measure
makes much of the intellectual comedy of repressed feeling, and a
spectacular tension is evident in its breathless, twisting plot, in
which sexual desire bursts the seams of order. The ending is
high-handedly dictated by the Duke himself, who takes Isabella as his
bride whether she likes it or not. Is the Duke any better at last than
a sexually obsessed Angelo -- and is Angelo redeemed? As in the
Sonnets, the author represents sexual desire as a force unmanageable,
immense, furtive, threatening, if not chiefly degrading, which not
even the wise can withstand.

Sexual desire and repulsion mix with a marital theme in
All's Well That Ends Well
.
Here the action is based on a story in Boccaccio
Decameron
, which the playwright found loosely translated in William Painter's
Palace of Pleasure
,
first printed in 1566. In Painter's very good rendition of it, one
Giletta of Narbonne, a physician's wealthy daughter, heals the ailing
French king of a fistula, a long, morbid pipelike ulcer in his body
with a narrow orifice. As Giletta's reward for her timely cure, the
king agrees that she be given in marriage to a reluctant Beltramo, who
stamps off to Florence, where he takes a lover. But Giletta, by a
ruse, sleeps with him in place of the new lady, and, after bearing him
two healthy sons and otherwise proving herself, she is received back
gladly by Beltramo.

While
exploiting folk-motifs in that story, Shakespeare develops a
remarkable heroine who is poor, of low rank, intelligent, and nervously
intense. For reasons purely of rhythm, he calls her both 'Hellen' and
'Helena' in
All's Well
'
s Folio text. But he introduces
her in scene i as Helena, the name of the third-century saint who in
legend, as the daughter of a British prince, wed a Roman emperor and
discovered the True Cross. Beltramo in Shakespeare's play becomes an
immature, easily led, but not quite unpleasant young Bertram, Count of
Roussillon. For his good heart, Bertram is admired by his mother the
Countess, the King, Lafeu, and others. The impasse is not sentimental
but psychological and sexual. Helena, who is worthy, craves the
physical love of Bertram, who, as a ward of the King, feels revulsion
in being made to wed her. That carries one back into the author's days
of
Venus and Adonis
,
and indeed Southampton's career and Shakespeare's Sonnets meet in Bertram's dilemma. As a defiant

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royal ward, Shakespeare's patron had once yearned for war before
becoming the Earl of Essex's General of the Horse in Ireland. The
play's hero flees to Italy, where in a pointless war he wins credit as a
General of the Horse before his moral decline.

Bertram's psychology is developed realistically, so that his duplicity,
vanity, and confusion are apparent even at the end of Act V. All
along, he resembles the lovely youth of the Sonnets, admired or adored
whatever he does. He is no worse than a rash, unbridled child for the
Countess. For the French King he is a 'proud, scornful boy'. For
grudging Paroles, he is 'sweetheart' and 'a foolish idle boy' or a
'lascivious young boy'.
²¹
Certainly, the parallels with a former patron are not very close.
Bertram is made to marry as Southampton was not, and the author is not
known to have based a portrait, in any poem or drama, on one living
model. Nonetheless, the English ward system which victimized
Southampton has an approximate counterpart in the French King's
command to marry, and Bertram -- like the fickle boy in 'A Lover's
Complaint' -- is probably compounded from imagination and life.

With antecedents in plays dating from Two Gentlemen to Twelfth Night,
Helena has a relation to Henley Street piety. She is the most overtly
religious of heroines, despite her wit in bantering over her virginity
with bawdy Paroles. The author's values were 'derived from the culture
of his Warwickshire ilk and diverged significantly from the received
ideas of both city and court', Germaine Greer has argued, and it
follows that Shakespeare did not think of 'constancy as a psychosexual
characteristic allied to masochism'.
²²
No doubt he believed in constancy, whether or not the theatre or his
own brothers overwhelmed him with examples of it. In the 'bed trick',
which appears in both
Measure for Measure
and
All's Well (and derives from Boccaccio)
,
a legitimate bed-mate substitutes for a male's fancied lover. So the
feckless Bertram sleeps with his Helena, whom he takes to be the
virgin Diana. The 'bed trick', of course, underlines lust's
reductiveness, and the author uses it with a kind of ironic trust, even
with a script writer's relief, as if satisfied that a night in bed
might not solve problems in life, but could solve an intractable
problem on stage. And it works. Who doubts that? Certainly an
audience, watching a

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production of
All's Well
,
can be made to feel that Bertram needs Helena, or that, at least, he
is ripe for reform. Their marriage need not be a bleak hell, but then
their incompatibility is chiefly dramatized in five acts. For
Shakespeare at about 40, spiritual redemption might be a dream
unrelated to the facts of any complex, realistically seen human
dilemma. But he gives a convincing inwardness to a rough folk-story,
thanks to what Robert Smallwood rather large-heartedly calls the
'infinite care and subtlety,
²³
with which he handles his earthy materials. Helena's role has not
proved to be easy to act, but she takes one as close to the ideals of
Elizabethan piety as any other figure in the dramatist's entire works.

Lately stage tragedies had helped to fill seats at the Globe, and Marston's and Thomas Heywood's tragic works were popular.
Hamlet
clearly drew crowds, and Heywood's realistic domestic tragedy
A Woman Killed With Kindness
,
acted at the rival Rose theatre early in 1603, had a relation to the
Globe's own great domestic tragedy about a black man who murders his
wife --
The Moor of Venice
,
which we know today as
Othello
.

Whether Heywood's work preceded or followed
Othello
,
the two dramas were similar enough in kind to compete. Shakespeare's
late tragic period' had its commercial causes, but the exigencies of
commerce nevertheless led to the display of his full intellectual
maturity in
Othello
as in
Hamlet
.
In
recent months, the petty, ubiquitous nature of social evil had not
been lost on him in London. He made use of nearly all of his
experience that we know about even as he studied the public's
attitudes. To many Londoners, the optimism over King James's accession
had begun to seem fragile. Thousands of workers and 'masterless'
souls looking for work streamed into a rich, beckoning English capital,
but the natural order of things punished the optimistic, liberated self.
In
Measure for Measure
,
the naïve, the innocent, or
the misled -- the 'Dizies' and 'Master Capers' of the day -- linger in
prison. Coming into London itself were hundreds of girls and young
women including two, whom we know about, from the poet's own

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Stratford-upon-Avon. Elizabeth Evans 'went to a house of ill reporte
in Moore lane' and to another 'house in Islington', one finds in
London's Bridewell archive today. (These cases were recorded shortly
before 1604.) One Joice Cowden said that she had gone with 'the said
Elizabeth to schole togither at Stratford uppon haven', and George
Pinder, who was born at Stratford, deposed what he knew as follows:

George Pinder borne on Stratford uppon the haven saith that [he] knew
her father [of] Stratford uppon haven being a cutler [and] that the
saide Elizabeth was borne there. he further saith [that he] hath known
the said Elizabeth Evans about this citye three or foure yeares and he
hath heard a a verye bad reporte of her and. . . her friendes are
verye poorc and not of that abilitye to maintain her ( 1 Feb. 1597/
8-7 Nov. 1604, Bridewells prison).
²⁴

On Bankside, near the Globe and the Rose, were more than a few Elizabeths and Joices. What relation did
they
have to the new reign's promise? Shakespeare may never have seen
Elizabeth or Joice, but it is not so certain that their milieu is
absent from
Othello
.
The privileged, the gifted, the
well-disciplined, and the successful, too, might seem to be at the
mercy of hostile, impersonal forces, and the worthiest soul might
suffer the most. In comedies, he had sketched modern evils, although
the grief, anxiety, and pain in
As You Like It
or
Much Ado About Nothing
are partly assimilated and partly evaded in their comic plots. In
Hamlet
and then in
Othello
,
he uses tragic form in an exploratory way to appeal to the deep
awarenesses of theatre-goers, involving an audience in what they know
of their lives.

At the same time,
each of his mature tragedies involves a broader, more general
questioning as if to compensate for the artificiality of the play. He
is concerned with the possibility of telling valid truth on stage,
with testing his medium, even with clearing his head, and his
ambiguous feelings about his profession are involved. He adheres to no
formula, but relies as in
Othello
upon unusual beauty of
form and language, complex designs, and on the illuminations of
extreme suffering. Alert to his troupe's needs, he made
Othello
unusually rich in texture and strong in pathos. Arguably it was planned soon after
Hamlet
,
in which Ophelia's role was taken by a boy actor who sang well. The same boy, very talented, may also have acted Desdemona

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