Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan

1592-1623

Katherine Duncan-Jones

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781408139196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria de Shakespeare

An original and provocative study of the evolution of Shakespeare's image, building on the success of Duncan-Jones' acclaimed biography, Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life. Taking a broadly chronological approach, she investigates Shakespeare's changing reputation, as a man, an actor and a poet, both from his own viewpoint and from that of his contemporaries. Many different categories of material are explored, including printed books, manuscripts, literary and non-literary sources. Rather than a biography, the book is an exploration with biographical elements. The change in public opinion in Shakespeare's time is quite startling: Henry Chettle attacked him as an 'upstart Crow' in 1592, an attack from which Shakespeare sought to defend himself; and yet by the time of the First Folio in 1623 he had become the 'Sweet Swan of Avon!' and was fast becoming the national treasure he remains today.

This engaging and fascinating study brings the politics and fashions of Shakespeare's literary and theatrical world vividly to life.

ONE

UPSTART CROW

Trust them [‘Puppets’, i.e. actors] not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.¹

In Sonnets 110 and 111, published in 1609 along with the rest of the sequence, Shakespeare appears to comment on his professional career as an actor on the public stage. In the opening lines of 110 his speaker confesses, as if in response to someone’s reproach against him, that

Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view.

The word ‘motley’ seems to allude both to the long, multicoloured gown worn by a fool on a public stage or in a noble household, and to the wide variety of different costumes and characters assumed by a professional player, especially one whose position in the company required him to do a lot of ‘doubling’. In this second sense it can be linked with the celebrated attack made on Shakespeare, or ‘Shake-scene’, in 1592 as ‘an absolute Johannes fac totum’, a man who thinks he is versatile enough both to play all parts and to write all parts, whether on stage or off.² The Sonnet-Speaker’s note of breast-beating confession – ‘Alas, ’tis true’ – reflects awareness that promiscuous self-display as a ‘motley’ player is socially and morally contaminating. In the following sonnet the speaker’s tone of apology and self-inculpation is even more intense. But here he appeals to his interlocutor to blame the goddess Fortune, rather than the poet/speaker, for his many freely acknowledged crimes of self-exposure and moral compromise. It was cruel Fortune who ‘did not better for my life provide’. That is, she failed to ensure that the speaker found the circumstances of his life sufficiently prosperous to enable him to enter a more respectable profession. Fortune – the accident of his birth – left him with no better means of economic support ‘Than public means, which public manners breeds’ (Sonnet 111.4).

It is hard to read this line as anything other than an allusion to earning money from performing before a socially mixed audience on a public stage, or ‘scene’. Deductions about Shakespeare’s sexual and emotional life from even the most impassioned and personal-seeming of the Sonnets can never be more than speculative, for we have no sound external evidence on such matters with which to verify or refute them. But in the case of allusions to stage-playing and its attendant stigma, such as the lines just quoted, there is plenty of external evidence. We know both that Shakespeare was a professional player, and that his self-exposure on the stage repeatedly provoked disapproval. I have already glanced at the 1592 Groatsworth of witte, where Shakespeare is attacked as a pushy and over-ambitious player. From the end of 1594 he is reliably recorded as a leading member of one of the two major playing companies, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who were later to be adopted as the King’s Men by James I. This earliest surviving record, in the Chamber Accounts, relates to performances of comedies at Greenwich Palace on 26 and 28 December 1594, with William Kempe and Richard Burbage as the other two named servants who received payment.³

In addition to Groatsworth, there are several more early allusions to Shakespeare as an actor and a member of a playing company. In ‘L’Envoy’ appended to his epyllion Narcissus, itself appended to the longer verse narrative Cephalus and Procris, a man called Thomas Edwards presented an admiring round-up of contemporary poets. His book was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 22 October 1593, but seems not to have appeared until 1595. However, since only a single complete exemplar of this edition survives it is possible that an earlier printing has vanished altogether. A reference to the book by Nashe in 1596 suggests that Edwards’s poem was one of a number of ‘Pamphlagonian things’ printed by John Wolfe on the personal recommendation of Gabriel Harvey.⁴ In Edwards’s roll-call of contemporary poets Edmund Spenser is invoked first, as ‘Collyn’. He is praised both for his own poetry and for his account of ‘Sidneys honor’, presumably the elegy Astrophel published in his Complaints (1591). In the following stanza Edwards gestures towards Samuel Daniel. His awkwardly punning phrase ‘Deale we not with Rosamund’ embraces the joint appearance of Daniel’s sonnet sequence Delia with the appended Complaint of Rosamond, published in 1592, and reprinted twice that year. Next come Thomas Watson and Christopher Marlowe, both recently dead, who are alluded to as the amorous lyricists ‘Amintas’ and ‘Leander’. By the time we reach the following stanza Edwards has made it clear that his strategy is to allude to each writer under the name of the principal figure in his best known poem:

Adon deafly masking thro,

Stately troupes rich conceited,

Shew’d he well deserved to,

Loves delight on him to gaze

And had not love her selfe intreated,

Other nymphs had sent him baies.⁵

There is no doubt, therefore, that Edwards’s ‘Adon’ must allude to Shakespeare, here equated with the beautiful youth, loved by the Goddess of Love herself, who is at the centre of his poem Venus and Adonis (1593). Because Edwards is a clumsy writer, who writes elliptically and uses awkward word order and eccentric diction and orthography, the passage has not hitherto been thought to have very much to tell us either about Shakespeare’s writing or his reputation. Certainly its chief point is simply to eulogize him as the author of Venus and Adonis, who is as much to be admired as the beautiful youth Adonis, and perhaps especially to be admired by female readers (‘nymphs’). However, I believe that the first two lines of this stanza allude to Shakespeare’s status as a leading member of a playing company, or ‘stately troop’. OED’s earliest example of ‘troop’ for ‘A company of performers’ is as late as 1779.

Nevertheless, other words in these two lines suggest that it has this application here. The connections of ‘masking’ with acting are obvious. Edwards uses the word ‘Maskt’ for performing ‘in sundry shapes’ in Narcissus. The more puzzling term, for a modern reader, is ‘deafly’. However, in this period the adverb ‘deftly’ (often spelt ‘deffly’) seems regularly to have been associated with performance, whether musical or theatrical or both. OED’s supporting quotations include, from Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, ‘They dauncen deffly, and singen soote’;⁶ and, from Dekker’s A knights Conjuring (1607, sig. K2^v), ‘You shall see swaynes defly piping, and virgins chastly dancing’. In Shakespeare’s own Macbeth – though in a passage probably written by Middleton – Hecate summons her fellow-spirits with the words ‘Come high, or low; / Thyself and office deftly show’ (4.1.67–8). The example most directly comparable with Edwards’s comments on ‘Adon’/Shakespeare appears under OED’s entry on ‘deftly’ adv. 2, where – though the sentence is not quoted there in full – it occurs in close proximity to ‘Maskes’. This is in the anti-Marprelate pamphlet The Returne of Pasquill (1589), which was almost certainly written by Thomas Nashe. ‘Marforius’ threatens reprisals against the bishops’ libeller Martin Marprelate in a forthcoming play or entertainment:

another new worke which I have in hand, and intituled it, The May-game of Martinisme. Verie defflie set out, with Pompes, Pagents, Motions, Maskes, Scutchions, Emblems, Impreases, strange trickes, and devises, between the Ape and the Owle, the like was never yet seene in Paris-garden.⁷

As applied by Edwards to ‘masquing’, that is, to performing varied roles while wearing a disguise or stage costume, the word ‘deafly’ seems to allude to ‘Adon’/Shakespeare as a skilled and versatile member of a playing company, or ‘stately troupe’. He is one who delivers ‘rich conceited’ speeches, and/or perhaps takes part in plays that are as a whole ‘rich conceited’, that is, powerfully imagined or wittily written. Edwards’s lines are entirely consistent with the Groatsworth account of Shakespeare as a ‘Johannes fac totum’ of the stage, the difference being that while Edwards praises him highly for being at once a skilful stage player and a fluent poet, ‘Greene’/Chettle (see below) scorns him for exactly the same reason.

Image removed – rights not available

Fig. 2. Drawing by Ralph Brooke, York Herald, of coat of arms for ‘Shakespeare y^e player’ (1602).

Shakespeare qua actor was to be the object of further scorn some years later. In 1602 he was observed by Ralph Brooke, York Herald, to claim the status of an armigerous gentleman despite being a mere ‘player’.⁸ Brooke’s sketch of the Shakespeare crest, showing a rather scraggy falcon with droopy wings, rather than with its wings splendidly ‘displayed’ as described in the draft patent, may also suggest contempt. In addition to associating Shakespeare with an unrespectable profession, Brooke claimed that he was only ‘playing’ the part of a gentleman, having procured a questionable grant of arms from Garter King of Arms, William Dethick.⁹ It may also be significant that Brooke’s drawing belongs to the year 1602, that is, just after the death of John Shakespeare (d. 1601), to whom the grant had been made in 1596. William could now claim gentle status in the time-honoured way as the first-born son of a legally recognized armigerous gentleman, now defunct.

Being a player undoubtedly carried a stigma both in the Elizabethan period and beyond. A celebrated Act of the Privy Council in 1574 categorized players who were not members of a securely licensed company as rogues and vagabonds. In 1580 the author of A third blast of retraite from plaies and theatres (possibly Anthony Munday, later a prolific playwright) compared ‘plaiers in these daies which exhibit their games for lucres sake’ to ‘droanes, which wil not labor to bring in, but live of the labors of the paineful gatherers. They are therefore to be thrust out of the Bee-hive of a Christian Common-weale.’¹⁰ The professional and legal status of players was unusual and equivocal. Players who lacked the patronage either of a nobleman or of some eminent and wealthy gentleman were at risk of being driven from parish to parish as ‘rogues’, being given no opportunity to earn money from performance. A satirical account of the wretched plight of some companies so desperate for patronage that they would accept it even from the devil himself occurs in Dekker’s Newes from Hell (1606), a sequel to Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse.¹¹ Mercury helps the ferryman Charon to make up his financial accounts for the carriage of various individuals to Hell:

Item, lent to a companie of country players, being nine in number, one sharer, & the rest Jornymen, that with strowling were brought to deaths door, xiiid.ob.¹² upon their stocke of apparell, to pay for their boat hire, because they would trie if they could be suffred to play in the divels name.¹³

Yet those companies which were fortunate enough to enjoy eminent patronage had access both to considerable wealth (from fees at the door) and to powerful protection. Members of such companies could even on occasion get away with murder, as in the case of the Queen’s Man John Towne, who gave a fatal wound in the neck to the company’s leading player, William Knell, in a scuffle between the two players on 13 June 1587. Only three months later Towne received a pardon from the Queen.¹⁴ As E.K. Chambers has pointed out, companies of players were not cooperative mutual societies, like guilds of craftsmen or merchants. Playing companies were essentially feudal in character, for the relationship of players to their patron ‘had a mediaeval element, by which the derivation of playing from minstrelsy is strongly recalled.’¹⁵ Licensed players who enjoyed royal or noble patronage were categorized as high-ranking household servants. Companies under the direct patronage of the monarch, such as the Queen’s Men, a company to which I believe Shakespeare at one time belonged, enjoyed the status of Grooms of her Chamber. As Philip Henslowe’s so-called Diary shows, takings at the public theatres could be very substantial, so those players who qualified for a share of the takings, or even a half-share, could do extremely well out of successful performances.

It is not surprising, therefore, if, during Shakespeare’s early career, those players who managed to secure eminent patronage provoked intense jealousy among non-performing playwrights and poets, who were unlikely ever to achieve a comparable level of privilege and reward. The dying Greene’s (supposed) warning to his university-educated friends to beware of being ‘subject to the pleasure of such rude groomes’ appears to be a dig at the ‘rude’ or lowly origins of many of the Queen’s Men, individuals undeservedly, in his view, elevated to membership of the royal household. Technically they were ‘grooms of the chamber’, according to OED’s sense 4, in which ‘groom’ was the designation of ‘several officers of the English Royal Household, chiefly members of the Lord Chamberlain’s department’; however, the epithet ‘rude’ suggests OED’s sense 3 definition of ‘groom’ as ‘A man of inferior position’. From the ventriloquized mouth of Robert Greene, a university graduate and therefore a gentleman, such abuse is natural. What is much more surprising is the extent to which prejudice against the acting profession has persisted into modern times, having a continued impact on contemporary perceptions of Shakespeare’s professional career. Even today it is commonplace for academic scholars to dismiss or sideline Shakespeare’s activities as an actor, despite many records that indicate that these both preceded his career as a playwright, and continued in tandem with it. The continuation of Shakespeare’s acting career was twice testified publicly by Jonson, a man not always inclined to give credit where credit was due. The 1616 Folio text of his Every Man In his Humour places Shakespeare in the prime position, top left, in the appended list of ‘The principall Comeoedians’, opposite Burbage, when the play was first performed in 1598; and the Folio text of Sejanus his Fall lists ‘WILL SHAKE-SPEARE’, this time top right, facing Burbage top left, as a ‘principall Tragoedian’ in 1603.¹⁶ Even more powerful is the testimony included in the posthumous First Folio of Shakespeare’s own plays, in which the list of ‘The Names of the Principall Actors, in all these Playes’ is headed by that of William Shakespeare, top left. The phrase ‘in all these Playes’ may, I think, imply that he had been a leading performer in every single play included in the Folio, including some of which, as we now know, he was not sole author, such as Timon of Athens and Henry VIII.

Two illustrations of h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Author’s Note
• Prologue: Kill-cow
• Chapter One: Upstart Crow
• Chapter Two: Three Early Readers
• Chapter Three: Poet and Gentleman
• Chapter Four: The Rival Poets
• Chapter Five: Silver-tonguèd Melicert
• Chapter Six: Groom of the Chamber
• Chapter Seven: Sweet Swan of Avon!
• Appendix
• Abbreviations and References
• Notes
• Imprint