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So I'd like you to imagine that it is January the 23rd, the afternoon of January the 23rd, 1594,

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and that the figure in blue here in the foreground is William Shakespeare out for a stroll.

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Behind him, you'll see London's Theatre District with Henlow Theatre, the rose immediately behind him,

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where that very afternoon there was a production of Shakespeare's play, Titus Andronicus,

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which brought in £3 and eight shillings, according to Winslow's, those accounts.

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We zoom out a bit, we get a larger picture of Shakespeare's London.

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Here to the north is the rival playhouse, too, hence Loews.

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The theatre owned by James Burbage,

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and quite possibly at the same moment they would have been a rival production of Shakespeare's work by Pembroke Men at that theatre.

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They certainly owned Taming of the Shrew and some of the Henry Six plays.

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If we look elsewhere here, St Paul's at the centre of the city would have been the heart of London's publishing industry.

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And there you could buy copies of Shakespeare's best selling poem, Venus and Adonis, which was to be joined by the rape of Lucrece in May of 1594.

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Now. Venus and Adonis was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, who lives here at Greys in one of the Inns of Court,

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which was the main location where Shakespeare's generally male literary readership would have spent its time attending plays and reading poems.

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And these men would also be many of them have visited Westminster, the centre of government,

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and I suppose the ultimate centre of patronage for someone like Shakespeare.

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So think Shakespeare at the beginning of 1594, as I like to imagine him as weighing up his options.

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Things are really already going exceptionally well.

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He has plays by him being performed by multiple acting companies strangers, men, Sussex's men, Darby's men and Brooks Men.

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He has a hit poem. He's attracted the attention of a leading aristocrat.

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And this is a very successful career, but it's also a pretty normal one.

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If we look at the kinds of rivals that Shakespeare had, men like Marlowe or Drayton or Johnson or Webster or Chapman.

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They all have this kind of spread of career plays performed by multiple companies that interested in printed verse,

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and they're interested in attracting patronage.

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Shakespeare is already quite established in that circuit with more than half a dozen plays.

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But in 1594 January of that year, he is contemplating a radical step.

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And in this lecture, I'm interested in trying to assess the consequences of his decision.

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In June of that year, to buy a18 share in an acting company, to become a sharer, to invest a great deal of money,

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and to link himself to a single troupe of players, something that no literary playwright had ever done.

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Now, the idea that this is, in fact, an early portrait of William Shakespeare is not yet fully won the confidence of scholars, though.

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I think if you look carefully, the similarities between the Hohenberg view of London and the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare are very striking.

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I think he's using that blue hat to hide the early onset baldness,

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and I think he's sort of turning the other cheek there because he's worried that his mum might see the earring,

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which he's kind of acquired as a raffish New London Gentleman's Touch.

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The reason I think it's useful to set these figures alongside each other is because we cannot escape having visual impressions of our authors.

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And then in the absence of portraits, we tend to invent them.

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And the portrait of Shakespeare that I think we've most been driven towards

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accepting by biographers is the idea of Shakespeare as a travelling player.

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This is think about this biochemist from 1608 depicting a set of travelling players, setting off in a small town, offering their wares.

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This is generally the way in which people see early Shakespeare.

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They imagine him having joined up with some troupe of players as they pass through Stratford sometime in the late 1880s.

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Now that entire story is based on a single sentence. In a misattributed pamphlet called Green's wrote Green's gross worth of wit in

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which there's a sentence about shake seen as being wrapped in a player's hide.

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And that has become the entire basis of this story of Shakespeare as a travelling player.

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Now, Shakespeare is, in fact, much more socially established than that kind of background suggests.

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He's the son of a burgess of Stratford, an extremely well-educated humanist poet,

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and his background is no different from that of a Christopher Marlowe,

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who was the son of a saddle maker and shoemaker, or Ben Jonson, whose father was a bricklayer.

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All of the London literary talent, the playwrights of this period came from that kind of second generation artisan background.

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Some of them went to university, but very many of them,

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such as Webster or Johnson or Munday or Drayton, the fellow Warwickshire playwright poet, did not.

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And some of those men did indeed perform occasionally on London stages when their own plays were being put on,

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as Johnson did, for example, or as mundane Monday did, or probably also kid.

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And sometimes they were mocked for this, for being players. Johnson was much more often mocked for having been a player than Shakespeare was.

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But I think it's very dangerous to turn this into this narrative of Shakespeare as somehow an outsider,

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awed by a literary firmament coming in as some kind of itinerant traveller who

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works his way up from patching plays to become becoming a literary genius.

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There's anything in the biographical record to suggest that, and I think this is a backward reading from that decision that Shakespeare made in 1594.

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If we want to think about a realistic picture of Shakespeare,

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I think we should start with looking at the works that he actually brought out in print in his early career.

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And this is Venus and Adonis, brought out by Richard Field, London's premier literary publisher, in April 1594.

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We have Shakespeare there, quoting from Ovid, William Mary, to evoke me.

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He was a polo popular Castilian plain admitted, meaning stretched aqua.

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Let the vulgar herd be interested in low things.

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I crave the golden cups of Apollo and the Cups of the Muses is what Shakespeare is saying.

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Very bold declaration publishing a literary work with a premier literary publisher.

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Making his claim as a literary poet playwright.

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And the work is dedicated in intimate terms to Henry Real honestly, the Earl of Southampton.

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And there's no sense in the way that Shakespeare is introducing himself here in that dedication.

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No sense that he has any affiliation with an acting company,

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in which case he would sign himself as the member of the household of an established Lord.

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And the fact that Shakespeare's plays are distributed across multiple acting companies again proves that point.

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So Venus and Adonis is immediately joined by the rape of Lucrece, which is dedicated in still more intimate terms to the Earl of Southampton.

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And if we look at the first Shakespeare play to be printed, that very Titus Andronicus that we saw on stage on the 23rd of January 1594,

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we see that it has been played by the time it comes into print that year by the Earl of Derby,

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the Earl of Pembroke, and the Earl of Sussex's Servants.

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It's a play distributed across acting companies, a playing which Shakespeare's lost his financial stake as soon as he is sold it to an acting company.

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So Shakespeare in 5094 has a way of operating that is very similar commercially to that of other playwrights.

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He has a background that is similar to other playwrights.

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But things are about to change. In June of that year, he was going to join an acting company.

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And what I'm going to suggest in this lecture is that this is actually the transformative decision in Shakespeare's life.

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It's the decision that moves him away from the mainstream, not just in terms of wealth.

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He becomes far richer than any other playwright or poet of his time, not just in working methods,

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in being tied uniquely to a single acting company from that point on,

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but also much more fundamentally in the style of his writing,

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that it's really that decision that makes Shakespeare Shakespearean in the sense that we use that term today.

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So this is a list of works that Shakespeare has produced before the summer of 50, 94, and it's a pretty impressive resume already.

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So what we have here are those two printed poems which become extremely popular.

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We also have Shakespeare working collaboratively, as new research now confirms with major university playwrights Henry six,

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probably with additions by Thomas Nash and Titus Andronicus, co-authored with the Oxford playwright George Peel.

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So Shakespeare is moving comfortably in that sort of company.

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He's also been involved in major multi author projects like Edward the Third, which is sort of produced by around about half a dozen playwrights.

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The same with the additions to the play Sir Thomas Moore.

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And the direction of travel that Shakespeare's career is taking, I would argue, is,

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if anything, towards the more literary, towards the more highbrow, towards the more formal.

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And that trajectory would be one that we could call John Stone, even though it precedes Ben Johnson's career.

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So if you look at the second half of the career,

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what you see is Shakespeare becoming increasingly explicit in the way that he is following accepted classical models of composition,

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becoming more ornate, becoming in a way more architectural in his writing style.

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This is not at all a trajectory towards the development of what we would end up thinking of Shakespeare's artistic movement,

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which is a movement towards relational drama, about how characters respond to each other.

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It's not the direction I think we see Shakespeare moving in this period.

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Now, it would take me quite a while to sort of demonstrate the case that Shakespeare is a literary playwright in this first phase of his career.

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And I'm going to have to make do with just one example, the example of Richard the third.

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Now, this is a play probably performed by Pembroke or maybe strangest men in the period 1592 to 1593,

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perhaps also by a club, by a joint company, when strangers join with the admirals, with Edward Alleyne as the lead player.

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Now there are a number of qualities to the play,

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Richard The third that would make me call it fundamentally literary rather than kind of character based in its composition.

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One of those things is that it has 52 speaking parts, exceptionally large number,

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none of whom, apart from the lead protagonist, survive across the full run of its five acts.

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And it has a great deal in common, for example, with the great drama of Marlowe.

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It's dominated by a captivating anti-hero who controls the stage,

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around whom all the other characters are really sort of constellation or reference points, rather than fundamentally actors in their own right.

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It's also a play very dominated by an explicit set of relationships to other well-known works the works of Marlowe,

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the works of Thomas Kidd, and, for example, also the works of Seneca.

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So it's it's a work dominated by lots of Seneca and i.e. the Roman tragic poet Seneca and features very frequent use of stoic amnesia.

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The line by line exchanges very many long echoing speeches by those very cynical characters ghosts.

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It has an opening monologue along the Seneca model.

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Now is the winter of discontent, setting a free, a predominant mood of gloom.

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If you take something from, for example, the first scene of the play following that monologue.

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The interview between Richard and Anne, which is performed over the House of Arms, recently deceased husband.

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What you see there is a scene very deliberately modelled on a Senate precedent is not actually a scene from the Chronicles at all.

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The wooing of a widow by the man responsible for her husband's death and the

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scene that's lying behind this is the interview between like us and Maghera.

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In Seneca's, Hercules fury ends and Shakespeare is here using the cynic and try meta for this strike a mythic exchange this one by one line exchange.

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I would. I knew that I heart Richard. Tis figured in my tongue.

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I fear me. Both are false. Then never. Man was true.

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Well, well. Put up your sword. Say, then my peace is made.

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That shall though no hereafter. But shall I live in hope?

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All men I hope live so vouchsafed to take this ring to take is not to give.

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Now there's a kind of wonderful, balletic balance quality to that kind of writing that is profoundly influenced by Roman models of rhetoric.

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So you see all of these neat anti-matter ballet and chaotic features.

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False. True. Live. Live.

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Hope. Hope. Set in that kind of almost sort of jewel like structure that lots of these sort of neat reversals on concepts.

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Take, give. Now, this is, I think, wonderfully established drama, and it helps to create Richard as this captivating anti-hero.

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But it's not, I would argue, very much a play about the relationship between individuals.

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The relationships that we see in these play,

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in this play are really more the relationships between Shakespeare as a literary creator and a set of other literary creators,

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not just Seneca, but also figures like Marlowe and Kidd.

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Whose Spanish tragedy also has a tri metre wooing scene by between Balthasar and Bel Imperial using exactly this kind of pattern.

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So Shakespeare has been moving in a direction towards this increasingly literary drama would be my argument.

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But in 1594, he makes this very bold decision.

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He decides to invest around about £50, which is two years wages for a educated man in England at this time.

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He decides to invest that by becoming a shareholder in a newly formed acting company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

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An acting company that, by order of the Privy Council, is to be one of two duopoly companies that will now have the right to perform at court.

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And by paying that £50 share.

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Shakespeare is buying a one eighth share of the apparel of an acting company,

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the props that they use and the costumes that they use, and also one eight share in the place of that company.

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So this is a substantial investment in what is intended to be and indeed proved to be a very long term financial arrangement,

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one that actually continued to Shakespeare's death and those people that he bound himself to.

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They keep appearing in Shakespeare's legal papers. Those that survive appear in his will, and he appears in their wills when they die.

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So the company, first of all, it starts out appearing in June 1594 at Newington Bucks, which is just about a mile south of London Bridge.

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And a little bit off the map, they don't find that a very adequate theatre.

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On October the eighth, they're reported as performing at the Crosskeys in in the centre of the city,

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where the local inhabitants complain about the noise of their drums and trumpets, forcing them to move out in a kind of NIMBY way.

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So in spite of their their patron doing his best for them and trying to kind of keep them with this central London base,

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they instead move up to the Theatre Playhouse, which becomes their home for the next five years.

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And unsurprising choice because the Theatre Playhouse was built and is owned by the father of Shakespeare's lead actor Richard Burbage.

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It was built by his father, James. So what happens is that you get the establishment of this duopoly arrangement.

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Admiral's Men, which take Marlow's stock of place, end up taking over the Rose Playhouse to the south of the city.

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And Shakespeare is part of a company to the north, and they start dominating the market for Christmas plays at court.

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So on the 27th of December, we see record of Shakespeare's company with Kemp, one of his comic actors,

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and William Shakespeare recorded as performing amongst the Christmas plays of that year's court entertainment.

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Now I want to argue that this did something more to Shakespeare than simply make him financially secure.

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I think it changed the way that he wrote. So here is the list of work that Shakespeare produced from mid 1594 to 1598.

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We see things like the dropping away of printed poetry, which stops interesting Shakespeare.

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From this point on, I think we also, I would argue, start seeing a different way of writing.

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And one of the most obvious things that happens in those first two years is that Shakespeare produces

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two plays in which the process of casting for a production becomes a key topic in the plot.

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So Love's Labours Lost, which is the first play that Shakespeare writes for the new company,

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has the Pageant of the Nine Worthies put on by Don Armado and his troupe.

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And a midsummer Night's Dream famously, of course, has the rehearsals of those rude mechanicals.

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Now those play rehearsals, of course, they show Shakespeare having a new interest in the physical business of putting on a play.

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The actors in those performances make all the kind of mistakes that one would expect

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slightly amateurish performers to make in comparison with professional players.

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They do things like forget their lines. They want the scripts altered.

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They corpse. They write their cue lines as part of their own performance.

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And these are the kinds of things that one might expect a playwright like

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Shakespeare to pick up on once he is in the daily company of a set of players.

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Much more fundamental than that. What I think these rehearsal scenes show is a physical specificity to Shakespeare's acting parts.

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Shakespeare's characters, after 1594 start to become physically distinctive,

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something that no playwright had done before across multiple parts in a play.

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And that, I think, is also the key to why Shakespeare's character and the characters in Shakespeare change from being,

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in a sense, architectural and classical to becoming relational.

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So this is the rehearsal scene in a midsummer Night's Dream.

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This is my chance to do some voices. Is all our company here?

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Here. Peter Quince. Flute. You must take this.

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Be on you. What is this? Be a wandering knight.

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It is the lady that Pyramus must love. Hey, Faith, let me not play a woman.

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I have a bit coming. That's all. One should play it in a mosque, and you may speak it as small as you will.

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I'm home by fish. Let me place this be true.

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I'll speak it in a monstrous little voice is me, sees me.

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Oh, Pyramus love it here I our Roy was gently, as it were, already Nightingale.

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You can play no part. But Pyramus, for Pyramus is a sweet faced man, a proper man, as one shall see in a summer's day.

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And most lovely gentlemen like me. And therefore, you must need to play Pyramus.

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Well, I will undertake it.

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Now, the part of bottom here was certainly taken by William Kemp, who I've already mentioned the most famous player of Shakespeare's ensemble.

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In 1594, somebody you know already, for example, a letter bearer for the Earl of Leicester,

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travelling with him as part of his troupe to the low countries in the 1580s.

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Something really a figure from an earlier generation to Shakespeare and Burbage,

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his newly tragic actor, fantastically physical figure in a really major athlete.

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Will Kemp, also somebody famously ugly as he writes about himself being in this,

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his own publication, The Nine Days Wonder, and somebody who makes much of his plain speaking.

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He says that he doesn't like to use grand words.

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So characters like Balsam and then later characters like Lancelot, Garbo or Dog very clearly wrestle for this hulking physical presence.

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Now, that, I think, is one part of what Shakespeare is doing in a play like a midsummer Night's Dream, that he's writing for a star like Kemp.

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But that was not really what was unique about what happened after 1594.

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Star players had always had playwrights tailoring parts to them.

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And Kemp is, for example, advertised on the cover of printed plays as a feature of those plays in production.

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But what I think we start seeing is that this physicality of individual players starts to produce something much more complex.

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Something I would like to call relational drama.

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A drama where character starts to become not just debateable in terms of its interior motivation,

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but debateable in the set of emotions that tie characters together.

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Now it's sort of almost kind of considered a bit embarrassing for professional academics.

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In lecture these days to talk about character. It's kind of considered something a bit that sort of schoolkids do and that we should be talking

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about much grander things like sort of Marxist political forces or something like that.

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But character is a technical achievement of, of drama and to to kind of get into the,

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the kind of mechanics of drama, of drama and character creation is, I think, a very useful thing.

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And who better than to bring us kind of mechanics of drama than Germans?

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Manfred Forster's written this fantastic book called Das Drama, in which he analyses very acutely how the effect of character is produced in plays.

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And he sort of divides this book up in a very kind of fantastically logical way.

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So section 1.4. 7 to 1 .4. 19 deals with the functions of character creation.

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It's kind of it's got something like kind of Volkswagen to it. I think maybe that's not such a good thing to compliment people on.

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But anyway, Pfister he says the sort of basic tools for creating character are referential speech and expressive speech.

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It says really an early modern drama in Renaissance drama.

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These are the two dominant modes, and referential speech is simply speech where somebody is described.

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So the most simple way in which you can have referential character creation is through a chorus saying, This is what this character is thinking.

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Expressive speech is where a character tells you themselves what they are thinking.

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So a soliloquy is the standard form of expressive speech.

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If we look at the rude mechanicals scene, we can say, okay, yes,

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there are moments where character is in a sense being described as through a referential frame, so to speak.

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Is the lady Pyramus must love is a referential statement about character.

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I have a bit coming is an expressive statement of character.

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It's a character telling you something about themselves.

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Now, once you have a set of physical characters,

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a degree of complexity enters into those statements because what you have is an explicit statement of character.

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I have a beard coming that might be an implicit statement that kind of undercuts that,

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which is perhaps you don't quite have very much of a beard yet at all.

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So you already start to create, I think,

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a slightly more complex kind of character if you're thinking of individual players as you create a statement like I have a beard coming.

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But one of the things that adds to that is that Shakespeare, after 1594,

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starts using techniques of characterisation that are actually not normally associated with Renaissance drama at all.

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Manfred Pfister says that really a phenomenon of modern drama and this is partly a palliative characterisation.

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Competitive characterisation is where persuasion becomes part of how a character is characterised,

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i.e. how they are trying to influence people around them and how they respond to attempts to influence them.

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So it's a kind of relational bond. So he says the greater the appellate of characterisation in the scene,

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the more acts of persuasion and signs of acknowledgement of persuasion you see in a scene.

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So something like Quince is Pyramus is a sweet faced man.

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Therefore you need must play Pyramus.

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It's giving us implicit and explicit forms of characterisation.

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Gives us something about Quint's as a character. It also implicitly tells us something about what kind of character bottom is here too.

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Perhaps not such a sweet faced man, but that he might be flattered by such a reference.

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And finally, what you have is fanatic speech. Fanatic speech, according to Fest, is really unknown in Renaissance drama, apart from in Shakespeare.

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And this is where characters simply speak to fill up the time, to keep the bond between figures, to tie them together.

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He says, for example, this is a very striking feature of Beckett's work.

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The characters often just sort of burble on to try and fill gaps.

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And this is very much a marker of Shakespearean speech. Post 1594.

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No faith. Well, no, no. And you may and I may.

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That whole sort of network, I think,

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allows us to see how something like the rude mechanicals ends up producing not just a distinctive figure in bottom,

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but a distinctive community where this group has quite a complicated relationship to someone like Nick Bottom,

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who they mourn when he is lost, who is in certain ways boastful, but who's also rather sweet and willing to be helpful,

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who everyone sort of looks up to, even as they say, perhaps he tends to go over the top.

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What we find in these post 1594 works is I think a kind of very complicated relationship between this physical distinctiveness

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and emergent character and the way in which that lends complexity to the interiority of characters themselves.

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And we see it in other parts of Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, in the relationship between Helena and Hermia,

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the two girls or women who find themselves in the forest of Athens looking for lovers.

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And Helena is famously tall and thin and white.

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Hermia is low and dark and fierce.

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And this is the basis of most of their roles together, as they accuse each other of being,

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you know, a puppet or a vixen and a shrew and being called little.

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And what you get is also this sort of paradoxical thing, where Hermia, though she be little, is fierce.

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And this actually is just starts happening more and more across Shakespeare's plays as you move across.

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This is the rehearsal scene or the performance scene, rather, in Love's Labours Lost,

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where we get the pageant of the Nine Worthies and Holofernes is this thin figure has been given the role of Alexander the Great,

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for which he admits he is or part it, which is a neologism.

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It's the first time that word or it it's been used in English.

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And I think it's very telling that Shakespeare should have come up with that neologism right at

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this moment where he's sort of thinking about the way in which one might cast a work like this.

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So he says, I will not be put out of countenance. And then the aristocrats viciously mock his countenance.

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Thou hast no face. What is this, a sitting head? The head of a bodkin.

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A death's face in a ring. An old Roman coin, scarce, seen half cheek in a brooch.

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They have all this kind of abuse that is directed at Holofernes, who's sort of struggling desperately to take on this role.

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And then he he has this response, which I think is very characteristically Shakespearean, which is actually sort of rather moving,

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rather morally powerful line where he says this is not generous, not gentle, not humble.

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Suddenly cuts against that line of abuse.

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And I think this physicality of players this way in which Shakespeare is thinking about individuals as he cast his plays,

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is part of the key to the way in which his writing changes after 1594.

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And you find this even in really relatively minor little playlists within plays such as this,

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the momentary row as though to shoot in the second part of Henry four is about to be taken off by a beetle.

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This is just a character called The First Beetle. But as Dota2 chief is being taken away,

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there is again this mockery of him as this thin figure standing in contrast to the supposedly pregnant, doltish cheat.

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Though the beadle denies this and says she just has cushions under her dress.

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So the hostess is saying what is the fruit of her womb miscarry?

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Again, this is a characteristic mode of speech that the overground hostess tends to have.

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The Beatle says, Oh, well, she shall have a dozen cushions again. They have but 11 now.

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And the dolls response to this sort of this attack on her own bulk is you rogue?

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Come bring me to a justice. Yes, says doll chest.

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You starved, bloodhound. Goodman death.

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Goodman, bones. Thou anatomy. You know this.

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This thin, miserable figure, you thin thing, you rascal.

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And Beatles kind of characteristically sort of fatigue space filler of very well, not a moment like this.

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It's clear that Shakespeare was thinking of a particular actor, a particular actor who looked thin.

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And we can actually tell this because when the play was printed, it was printed from Shakespeare's working papers,

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his foul papers, and Shakespeare did not when he first wrote that scene.

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Right. First Beatle, he wrote Sinclair, the name of John Sinclair,

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an actor in his company who was famously thin, who appears in later plays to as a thin man.

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And this. And again, a feature entirely unique to Shakespeare, the slipping in of actors names as he composes.

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His tendency to write first for an individual and second to give that character a name.

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So throughout this scene, we get synchro, synchro, synchro rather than beetle at all.

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Same thing in Much Ado About Nothing. Again, set from Shakespeare's fall papers where the entrances are for camp rather than dog,

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Bree and Cowley, another actor in the company rather than Verges.

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So Shakespeare, as he is producing that first draft,

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is thinking of a set of individuals he knows and the way in which they might work on the stage rather than anything else.

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So all of these entrances are a camp, and it was ultimately that set of players who put together Shakespeare's Folio

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after his death and put their own names onto the opening pages of the work.

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Camp and Cowley, Hemmings and Condell.

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The two remember remaining members of the Fellowship were the ones who brought that addition to the press.

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So Shakespeare's career, I'd like to argue, was shaped by those figures, and it changed the way he thought about drama more fundamentally.

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People like Will Kemp, William Burbage, who became the first Hamlet, the first Macbeth, the first Othello, and all the rest of the major tragic roles.

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And then Robert Almond, who became the comic actor after Kemp left the company in 1600.

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So going back to this view of Shakespeare, looking over London, I'd like actually to imagine that these two ladies are not ladies at all,

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but perhaps two young boy actors who are here, perhaps a budding Hermia and Helena, tall and blonde.

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And with Burbage, they're standing ready to take on a heroic role.

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Shakespeare has his initial thoughts about a new play that has the working title.

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A midsummer Night's Dream. Thank you very much.