3
What was Shakespeare writing during his residency with the Mountjoys in c. 1603-5? There are five plays which belong in that broad time-span. They are, in probable order of composition: Othello, Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well, Timon of Athens and King Lear. A rate of two plays a year is about average for Shakespeare’s working life, and may even reflect an agreed productivity rate as the company’s ‘playmaker’. The cross-currents of composition, rehearsal and rewriting were complex. He was seldom working on less than two plays at once: ideas refract and reverberate between them.
Othello and Measure for Measure can be dated quite precisely. Both have references which suggest Shakespeare was at work on them in 1603, and both were performed at court towards the end of 1604 (their first recorded performances, though not necessarily their first performances).38By contrast, All’s Well and Timon have no documentary dating. Neither was printed before its appearance in the First Folio of 1623, and no early performances are recorded. (The recording of King’s Men performances is anyway very sketchy: there exists no ledger for the Globe comparable to Philip Henslowe’s diary, which lists performances and box-office takings at the neighbouring Rose.) All’s Well is generally dated to c. 1604 because of its affinities with Measure, and Timon to c. 1605 because its verbal parallels with King Lear seem more likely to be anticipations than echoes.39Lear itself, that mightiest of works, was first performed at the end of 1606, and its early gestation can also be placed, in a purely topographical sense, on Silver Street.
It is in many ways a curious list. Bookended by two of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies are these three rather odder, less popular works. One could call them ‘experimental’ but Shakespeare was constantly an experimenter, so perhaps one means they are experiments which do not wholly come off.
Measure for Measure and All’s Well are two of that group traditionally called the ‘problem plays’, or the ‘dark comedies’ - also in this group is the earlier Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), which falls outside my defined time-period but belongs with it in mood. The term ‘problem play’ is old fashioned but still more or less serviceable. It was coined by F. S. Boas in 1896, taking a tinge of the chief dramatists of the day, Ibsen and Shaw. Shaw tended showily to disparage Shakespeare, but liked these particular plays, where he found Shakespeare ‘ready and willing to start at the twentieth century if the seventeenth would only let him’40 - as perverse a statement of Shakespeare’s intentions as one could hope to find.
They are ‘problem’ plays because they are hard to categorize. Their tone is elusive, blurred, faintly unwholesome. ‘The air is cheerless,’ in Dover Wilson’s aphoristic summary, and ‘the wit mirthless’. The admirable characters are not entirely likeable, and the likeable characters not at all admirable. The humour is bitter; it has ‘a grating quality which excludes geniality and ensures disturbing after-thoughts’.41 They are also ‘problem plays’ in a more direct sense: plays which deliberately pose problems - ethical conundrums, tangled motives, characters ‘at war ’twixt will and will not’. They continue, in a different register, the mood ushered in by Hamlet at the beginning of the new century - nervy, questioning, ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’; and sickly also in the perception of malaise and corruption beneath the veneer of society: something ‘rotten in the state’. This is a particular theme of Measure for Measure, where the city’s ills lie less in the visible squalor of its prisons and brothels than in the concealed corruption of those in government:
Authority, though it err like others,
Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself
That skins the vice o’ th’ top . . . (2.2.135-7)
The overall quality of these plays is summed up by A. P. Rossiter - one of the most eloquent of the mid-twentieth-century analysts - as ‘shiftingness’:
All the firm points of view or points d’appui fail one, or are felt to be fallible . . . Like Donne’s love-poems, these plays throw opposed and contradictory views into the mind, only to leave the resulting equations without any settled or soothing solutions. They are all about ‘Xs’ that do not work out.
Or as it is sinuously expressed by the sceptical Lafeu in All’s Well: ‘Hence it is that we make trifles of our terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear’ (2.3.3-6).
In formal terms - indeed in terms of theatrical fashion and therefore partly market-driven - these plays are Shakespeare’s experiments in tragicomedy. The term originates with Plautus, the Roman comic dramatist much admired by Shakespeare, who called his play Amphitryon a ‘tragicomoedia’ because it improperly mingled gods and ordinary middle-class Romans. In Shakespeare’s day the new models were Italian writers like Giovanbattista Giraldi Cintio (known in England as Cinthio) and Giovanbattista Guarini, both products of the sophisticated court of Ferrara. The poet and diplomat Guarini, whose pastoral tragicomedy Il Pastor Fido (‘The Faithful Shepherd’) was translated into English in 1602, offers some interesting precepts. ‘True’ tragicomedy, he writes, avoids the ‘great themes’ of tragedy. It is realistic rather than fantastic, it blends ‘contrary qualities’, and it brings the characters through dangers and perplexities - through what he calls the ‘feigned knot’ (il nodo finto) of the story - to happiness.42 These elegant definitions, from an essay published with the English Pastor Fido in 1602, could well have been in Shakespeare’s mind when he was writing All’s Well that Ends Well a year or two later. The very title of the play is a somewhat ironic definition of tragicomedy, though at the end of it the best the King can muster is ‘All seems to be well.’
Hamlet has a humorous comment on these fashionable hybrids, as Polonius struggles to itemize the repertoire of the players newly arrived in Elsinore - they are, he assures us, ‘the best . . . either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical- pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral . . .’ (2.2.397-400).
The keynote of this new kind of tragicomedy is its mingling of disparate tones and emotions - what Guarini calls ‘contrary qualities’. Again Hamlet is a prototype, with its intrusions of sharp and sometimes seamy banter into the traditionally relentless format of Senecan revenge-tragedy. This is precisely the quality praised in what is probably the earliest surviving critical comment on the play. In his preface to Daiphantus (1604), the mysterious ‘An. Sc.’ hopes his own poem will be popular with the ‘vulgar’ (he means ordinary people; the phrase is not here pejorative), like ‘Shakespeare’s tragedies, where the Comedian rides when the Tragedian stands on tip-toe: faith, it should please all, like Prince Hamlet’.43
In All’s Well, the mingling of tones is particularly elusive. Its central narrative is based on old folk-motifs (‘Healing the King’, ‘The Clever Wench’), and there is a jarring between this fairy-tale tendency and the more modern timbre of scepticism and paradox. We are lulled by the sweet autumnal melancholy of the verse, and then we are laughed at for giving in so easily. With their intrinsic ambiguities, and their testing of credibilities, the problem plays have been called ‘Mannerist’44 - in other words, they share something with the distorted figures and perplexing perspectives of mid-sixteenth-century Italian painters like Parmigianino and Bronzino.
The heyday of Jacobean tragicomedy comes later - Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case, Massinger - but already in 1603 John Marston had produced a very idiosyncratic, urban type of tragicomedy, The Malcontent, which showed how the form could be adapted to the concurrent taste for satire and topicality. This play has analogies with Measure and was probably another spur - a competitive one - to Shakespeare.45
A simple and beautiful synopsis of these plays’ appeal is found in a couplet from Othello -
These sentences to sugar or to gall,
Being strong on both sides, are equivocal. (1.3.216-17)
To paraphrase prosaically - these sentences tend equally to sweetness or to bitterness, both of these qualities being powerfully present in them. The lines are spoken by Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, and have their own business within the dramatic moment, but extracted they serve as a kind of emblem or motto for Shakespeare’s tragicomedies.
If the tragicomedies balance, more or less measure for measure, their helpings of sugar and gall, Timon of Athens is pure gall. It is the bleakest of all Shakespeare’s plays, and vies with Cymbeline (though for different reasons) as the least staged work of Shakespeare’s mature years. It dramatizes a story he found in Plutarch’s Lives, of a rich Athenian whose followers and flatterers deserted him when the money ran out, and who turned his back on the world and lived wild in the woods: ‘Timon misanthropos’. The play has some magnificent patches of poetry, but the overall tone is harsh.
As it comes down to us - in the only contemporary text available, that of the 1623 Folio - Timon seems still in parts rough, unpolished, with loose ends ungathered. One reason for this irregularity is that the play was a collaboration. Shakespeare’s co-author was Thomas Middleton, a Londoner in his early twenties: a rising young star.46 He had begun as a poet in the satirical vein of Marston. His Microcynicon (1599), with its ‘six Snarling Satyres’, had been among the ‘unseemly’ works called in by the Archbishop’s censors in 1599. In the new century he began to work in the theatre, initially for the Admiral’s Men, chief rivals of Shakespeare’s company. Henslowe records payment to him in May 1602 for his contribution to a lost historical drama (‘Caesar’s Fall’, also called ‘Two Shapes’), a patchwork collaboration that also involved Dekker, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday and the young John Webster. Then comes the wonderful series of brash, smutty ‘city comedies’ that made his name - The Phoenix was performed at court at Christmas 1603, followed over the next few years by The Family of Love, A Trick to Catch the Old One, A Mad World, my Masters, The Puritan (also called The Widow of Watling Street), Your Five Gallants and others, mostly written for the children’s companies. Jonson called Middleton a ‘base fellow’, but the list of authors he disliked was a long one. Versatile, prolific and full of promise, Middleton was a prize catch for the King’s Men.
Shakespeare was no stranger to collaboration, but he did not, one suspects, take naturally to it, and as far as the evidence remains his partnership with Middleton was the first for about a decade. Early in his career he had tacked and botched with other writers: the hand of Nashe has been discerned in the Henry VI plays, and that of Peele in Titus Andronicus. In around 1593-4 he contributed to ‘Sir Thomas More’, a play which survives only in manuscript and was perhaps never performed.47 But once his career gets going he is remarkably solo. Over at the Rose - on the evidence of Henslowe’s accounts and diaries - it was the norm for a play to be written by anything from two to five writers. Few of the collaborations listed by Henslowe made it into print - we have lost such plays as Ben Jonson’s Hot Anger Soon Cooled, written with Henry Chettle - but among the younger writers in the new century collaborations were frequently printed as such - Eastward Ho! by Chapman, Jonson and Marston; Westward Ho! and Northward Ho! by Dekker and Webster; The Honest Whore and The Roaring Girl by Dekker and Middleton; and many works by Beaumont and Fletcher. It seems to have become a selling point - two or three talents (often very different kinds of talent) for the price of one.
Though Timon cannot be called an unqualified success, the passages now assigned to Middleton - which include almost all of Act 3 - are powerfully written, and it seems his connection with the King’s Men prospered. In about 1606 he turned out two fine tragedies for them: The Revenger’s Tragedy (published anonymously in 1607) and the short, topical A Yorkshire Tragedy (published in 1608). The title-page of the latter credits the play to ‘W. Shakspeare’.48 Similarly the first edition of Middleton’s comedy The Puritan (1607) is attributed to ‘W.S.’. These are opportunistic title-pages, marketing ploys, but they express accurately a new literary twinning. It is possible Shakespeare contributed some passages to the Yorkshire Tragedy.
Shakespeare may have been edged into this collaboration by professional pressure. He may have felt (or others in the company may have felt) that he needed the input of younger, sharper-edged writers like Middleton and, a little later, George Wilkins, who was sharp-edged in an altogether more dangerous way.
These are, in broad outline, the literary aspects of Shakespeare on Silver Street - the ‘bitter and complex music’ of the tragicomedies; the flawed collaboration with Middleton; the impending mental tempest of King Lear. It is a period of transition, of experiment, of paradox and contradiction: ‘a mingled yarn, good and ill together’ (All’s Well, 4.3.67).
How far this can be related to Shakespeare’s frame of mind during this period is, of course, a matter of debate. It was once fashionable to speak of Shakespeare’s output in the early seventeenth century as the product of a period of depression or illness, or what we might now call a mid-life crisis. This was energetically challenged in a famous lecture by C. J. Sisson, ‘The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare’ (1934). Sisson attacked the idea that Shakespeare wrote the tragicomedies as ‘a sufferer from pessimism and disillusionment, a victim of seventeenth century blues’. It simply does not follow, he thought, any more than ‘the proposition that tragic writing in a great creative writer is evidence of a tragic mood or personal unhappiness’. On the contrary, as Coleridge observed, ‘When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry.’ This is a corrective view, and the critical pendulum has continued to swing away from such personal interpretation of the plays (though the great modern maverick of Shakespeare studies, John Berryman, had a point when he said he was looking forward to ‘Professor Sisson’s studies of the mythical sorrows of St Paul, Villon, Dostoevsky, Father [Gerard Manley] Hopkins and Hart Crane’ - a point drastically underscored by Berryman’s own later suicide).49
It is true that biographical readings of the plays are dangerous, unregulated, prone to sentimentalization. It is absurd to cherry-pick passages of poetry, written over more than two decades, and infer from them a consistent personal attitude. Lines belong in a dramatic context, and in the psychological context of the character who utters them, and cannot be taken to reflect Shakespeare’s views. But perhaps the scepticism has swung too far in the direction of a bloodless text. Biography and literature do not fit together like Lego bricks, but they are not totally divorced either. Even E. M. W. Tillyard, a fine-toothed textual analyst who thought biographical interpretation ‘superfluous’, concludes an examination of the poetic unevenness of All’s Well by saying, ‘Some of these couplets are doing much what his couplets usually do; others in their strangeness point to an unusual mood in him when he wrote the play.’50
I am interested in recreating the physical and cultural circumstances of a period of Shakespeare’s life. The plays he was writing at the time are part of those circumstances. They are on his desk; they are on his mind; and it is permissible, within precise chronological boundaries, to draw links between them and the milieu in which he was living when he wrote them.
If Shakespeare had written - say - a play about a young Frenchman being pressed reluctantly into marriage, and if it could be shown that he wrote the play at a time when he was himself pressing a young Frenchman into marriage, then one might think it worth asking whether there was a connection between the fictional nuptials on stage and the actual ones he was involved in. That is in fact the case - the play is All’s Well - and it would be perverse to ignore these connections in the name of academic correctness. I would not call Stephen Belott a ‘model’ for Bertram, Count Roussillon, and I would not want to suggest that Shakespeare was ‘inspired’ by the small dramas of the Mountjoy household when he was writing of the troubled betrothal of Bertram and Helena. But the analogies are there. The ‘unconsidered trifles’ of domestic life are snapped up by the dramatist. They go into the mix, enriching it with secret flavours of particularity which are, for the most part, unknown to us.