So I'd like you to imagine that it is January the 23rd, the afternoon of January the 23rd, 1594,
and that the figure in blue here in the foreground is William Shakespeare out for a stroll.
Behind him, you'll see London's Theatre District with Henlow Theatre, the rose immediately behind him,
where that very afternoon there was a production of Shakespeare's play, Titus Andronicus,
which brought in £3 and eight shillings, according to Winslow's, those accounts.
We zoom out a bit, we get a larger picture of Shakespeare's London.
Here to the north is the rival playhouse, too, hence Loews.
The theatre owned by James Burbage,
and quite possibly at the same moment they would have been a rival production of Shakespeare's work by Pembroke Men at that theatre.
They certainly owned Taming of the Shrew and some of the Henry Six plays.
If we look elsewhere here, St Paul's at the centre of the city would have been the heart of London's publishing industry.
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.
Now. Venus and Adonis was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, who lives here at Greys in one of the Inns of Court,
which was the main location where Shakespeare's generally male literary readership would have spent its time attending plays and reading poems.
And these men would also be many of them have visited Westminster, the centre of government,
and I suppose the ultimate centre of patronage for someone like Shakespeare.
So think Shakespeare at the beginning of 1594, as I like to imagine him as weighing up his options.
Things are really already going exceptionally well.
He has plays by him being performed by multiple acting companies strangers, men, Sussex's men, Darby's men and Brooks Men.
He has a hit poem. He's attracted the attention of a leading aristocrat.
And this is a very successful career, but it's also a pretty normal one.
If we look at the kinds of rivals that Shakespeare had, men like Marlowe or Drayton or Johnson or Webster or Chapman.
They all have this kind of spread of career plays performed by multiple companies that interested in printed verse,
and they're interested in attracting patronage.
Shakespeare is already quite established in that circuit with more than half a dozen plays.
But in 1594 January of that year, he is contemplating a radical step.
And in this lecture, I'm interested in trying to assess the consequences of his decision.
In June of that year, to buy a18 share in an acting company, to become a sharer, to invest a great deal of money,
and to link himself to a single troupe of players, something that no literary playwright had ever done.
Now, the idea that this is, in fact, an early portrait of William Shakespeare is not yet fully won the confidence of scholars, though.
I think if you look carefully, the similarities between the Hohenberg view of London and the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare are very striking.
I think he's using that blue hat to hide the early onset baldness,
and I think he's sort of turning the other cheek there because he's worried that his mum might see the earring,
which he's kind of acquired as a raffish New London Gentleman's Touch.
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.
And then in the absence of portraits, we tend to invent them.
And the portrait of Shakespeare that I think we've most been driven towards
accepting by biographers is the idea of Shakespeare as a travelling player.
This is think about this biochemist from 1608 depicting a set of travelling players, setting off in a small town, offering their wares.
This is generally the way in which people see early Shakespeare.
They imagine him having joined up with some troupe of players as they pass through Stratford sometime in the late 1880s.
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
which there's a sentence about shake seen as being wrapped in a player's hide.
And that has become the entire basis of this story of Shakespeare as a travelling player.
Now, Shakespeare is, in fact, much more socially established than that kind of background suggests.
He's the son of a burgess of Stratford, an extremely well-educated humanist poet,
and his background is no different from that of a Christopher Marlowe,
who was the son of a saddle maker and shoemaker, or Ben Jonson, whose father was a bricklayer.
All of the London literary talent, the playwrights of this period came from that kind of second generation artisan background.
Some of them went to university, but very many of them,
such as Webster or Johnson or Munday or Drayton, the fellow Warwickshire playwright poet, did not.
And some of those men did indeed perform occasionally on London stages when their own plays were being put on,
as Johnson did, for example, or as mundane Monday did, or probably also kid.
And sometimes they were mocked for this, for being players. Johnson was much more often mocked for having been a player than Shakespeare was.
But I think it's very dangerous to turn this into this narrative of Shakespeare as somehow an outsider,
awed by a literary firmament coming in as some kind of itinerant traveller who
works his way up from patching plays to become becoming a literary genius.
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.
If we want to think about a realistic picture of Shakespeare,
I think we should start with looking at the works that he actually brought out in print in his early career.
And this is Venus and Adonis, brought out by Richard Field, London's premier literary publisher, in April 1594.
We have Shakespeare there, quoting from Ovid, William Mary, to evoke me.
He was a polo popular Castilian plain admitted, meaning stretched aqua.
Let the vulgar herd be interested in low things.
I crave the golden cups of Apollo and the Cups of the Muses is what Shakespeare is saying.
Very bold declaration publishing a literary work with a premier literary publisher.
Making his claim as a literary poet playwright.
And the work is dedicated in intimate terms to Henry Real honestly, the Earl of Southampton.
And there's no sense in the way that Shakespeare is introducing himself here in that dedication.
No sense that he has any affiliation with an acting company,
in which case he would sign himself as the member of the household of an established Lord.
And the fact that Shakespeare's plays are distributed across multiple acting companies again proves that point.
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.
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,
we see that it has been played by the time it comes into print that year by the Earl of Derby,
the Earl of Pembroke, and the Earl of Sussex's Servants.
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.
So Shakespeare in 5094 has a way of operating that is very similar commercially to that of other playwrights.
He has a background that is similar to other playwrights.
But things are about to change. In June of that year, he was going to join an acting company.
And what I'm going to suggest in this lecture is that this is actually the transformative decision in Shakespeare's life.
It's the decision that moves him away from the mainstream, not just in terms of wealth.
He becomes far richer than any other playwright or poet of his time, not just in working methods,
in being tied uniquely to a single acting company from that point on,
but also much more fundamentally in the style of his writing,
that it's really that decision that makes Shakespeare Shakespearean in the sense that we use that term today.
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.
So what we have here are those two printed poems which become extremely popular.
We also have Shakespeare working collaboratively, as new research now confirms with major university playwrights Henry six,
probably with additions by Thomas Nash and Titus Andronicus, co-authored with the Oxford playwright George Peel.
So Shakespeare is moving comfortably in that sort of company.
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.
The same with the additions to the play Sir Thomas Moore.
And the direction of travel that Shakespeare's career is taking, I would argue, is,
if anything, towards the more literary, towards the more highbrow, towards the more formal.
And that trajectory would be one that we could call John Stone, even though it precedes Ben Johnson's career.
So if you look at the second half of the career,
what you see is Shakespeare becoming increasingly explicit in the way that he is following accepted classical models of composition,
becoming more ornate, becoming in a way more architectural in his writing style.
This is not at all a trajectory towards the development of what we would end up thinking of Shakespeare's artistic movement,
which is a movement towards relational drama, about how characters respond to each other.
It's not the direction I think we see Shakespeare moving in this period.
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.
And I'm going to have to make do with just one example, the example of Richard the third.
Now, this is a play probably performed by Pembroke or maybe strangest men in the period 1592 to 1593,
perhaps also by a club, by a joint company, when strangers join with the admirals, with Edward Alleyne as the lead player.
Now there are a number of qualities to the play,
Richard The third that would make me call it fundamentally literary rather than kind of character based in its composition.
One of those things is that it has 52 speaking parts, exceptionally large number,
none of whom, apart from the lead protagonist, survive across the full run of its five acts.
And it has a great deal in common, for example, with the great drama of Marlowe.
It's dominated by a captivating anti-hero who controls the stage,
around whom all the other characters are really sort of constellation or reference points, rather than fundamentally actors in their own right.
It's also a play very dominated by an explicit set of relationships to other well-known works the works of Marlowe,
the works of Thomas Kidd, and, for example, also the works of Seneca.
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.
The line by line exchanges very many long echoing speeches by those very cynical characters ghosts.
It has an opening monologue along the Seneca model.
Now is the winter of discontent, setting a free, a predominant mood of gloom.
If you take something from, for example, the first scene of the play following that monologue.
The interview between Richard and Anne, which is performed over the House of Arms, recently deceased husband.
What you see there is a scene very deliberately modelled on a Senate precedent is not actually a scene from the Chronicles at all.
The wooing of a widow by the man responsible for her husband's death and the
scene that's lying behind this is the interview between like us and Maghera.
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.
I would. I knew that I heart Richard. Tis figured in my tongue.
I fear me. Both are false. Then never. Man was true.
Well, well. Put up your sword. Say, then my peace is made.
That shall though no hereafter. But shall I live in hope?
All men I hope live so vouchsafed to take this ring to take is not to give.
Now there's a kind of wonderful, balletic balance quality to that kind of writing that is profoundly influenced by Roman models of rhetoric.
So you see all of these neat anti-matter ballet and chaotic features.
False. True. Live. Live.
Hope. Hope. Set in that kind of almost sort of jewel like structure that lots of these sort of neat reversals on concepts.
Take, give. Now, this is, I think, wonderfully established drama, and it helps to create Richard as this captivating anti-hero.
But it's not, I would argue, very much a play about the relationship between individuals.
The relationships that we see in these play,
in this play are really more the relationships between Shakespeare as a literary creator and a set of other literary creators,
not just Seneca, but also figures like Marlowe and Kidd.
Whose Spanish tragedy also has a tri metre wooing scene by between Balthasar and Bel Imperial using exactly this kind of pattern.
So Shakespeare has been moving in a direction towards this increasingly literary drama would be my argument.
But in 1594, he makes this very bold decision.
He decides to invest around about £50, which is two years wages for a educated man in England at this time.
He decides to invest that by becoming a shareholder in a newly formed acting company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
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.
And by paying that £50 share.
Shakespeare is buying a one eighth share of the apparel of an acting company,
the props that they use and the costumes that they use, and also one eight share in the place of that company.
So this is a substantial investment in what is intended to be and indeed proved to be a very long term financial arrangement,
one that actually continued to Shakespeare's death and those people that he bound himself to.
They keep appearing in Shakespeare's legal papers. Those that survive appear in his will, and he appears in their wills when they die.
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.
And a little bit off the map, they don't find that a very adequate theatre.
On October the eighth, they're reported as performing at the Crosskeys in in the centre of the city,
where the local inhabitants complain about the noise of their drums and trumpets, forcing them to move out in a kind of NIMBY way.
So in spite of their their patron doing his best for them and trying to kind of keep them with this central London base,
they instead move up to the Theatre Playhouse, which becomes their home for the next five years.
And unsurprising choice because the Theatre Playhouse was built and is owned by the father of Shakespeare's lead actor Richard Burbage.
It was built by his father, James. So what happens is that you get the establishment of this duopoly arrangement.
Admiral's Men, which take Marlow's stock of place, end up taking over the Rose Playhouse to the south of the city.
And Shakespeare is part of a company to the north, and they start dominating the market for Christmas plays at court.
So on the 27th of December, we see record of Shakespeare's company with Kemp, one of his comic actors,
and William Shakespeare recorded as performing amongst the Christmas plays of that year's court entertainment.
Now I want to argue that this did something more to Shakespeare than simply make him financially secure.
I think it changed the way that he wrote. So here is the list of work that Shakespeare produced from mid 1594 to 1598.
We see things like the dropping away of printed poetry, which stops interesting Shakespeare.
From this point on, I think we also, I would argue, start seeing a different way of writing.
And one of the most obvious things that happens in those first two years is that Shakespeare produces
two plays in which the process of casting for a production becomes a key topic in the plot.
So Love's Labours Lost, which is the first play that Shakespeare writes for the new company,
has the Pageant of the Nine Worthies put on by Don Armado and his troupe.
And a midsummer Night's Dream famously, of course, has the rehearsals of those rude mechanicals.
Now those play rehearsals, of course, they show Shakespeare having a new interest in the physical business of putting on a play.
The actors in those performances make all the kind of mistakes that one would expect
slightly amateurish performers to make in comparison with professional players.
They do things like forget their lines. They want the scripts altered.
They corpse. They write their cue lines as part of their own performance.
And these are the kinds of things that one might expect a playwright like
Shakespeare to pick up on once he is in the daily company of a set of players.
Much more fundamental than that. What I think these rehearsal scenes show is a physical specificity to Shakespeare's acting parts.
Shakespeare's characters, after 1594 start to become physically distinctive,
something that no playwright had done before across multiple parts in a play.
And that, I think, is also the key to why Shakespeare's character and the characters in Shakespeare change from being,
in a sense, architectural and classical to becoming relational.
So this is the rehearsal scene in a midsummer Night's Dream.
This is my chance to do some voices. Is all our company here?
Here. Peter Quince. Flute. You must take this.
Be on you. What is this? Be a wandering knight.
It is the lady that Pyramus must love. Hey, Faith, let me not play a woman.
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.
I'm home by fish. Let me place this be true.
I'll speak it in a monstrous little voice is me, sees me.
Oh, Pyramus love it here I our Roy was gently, as it were, already Nightingale.
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.
And most lovely gentlemen like me. And therefore, you must need to play Pyramus.
Well, I will undertake it.
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.
In 1594, somebody you know already, for example, a letter bearer for the Earl of Leicester,
travelling with him as part of his troupe to the low countries in the 1580s.
Something really a figure from an earlier generation to Shakespeare and Burbage,
his newly tragic actor, fantastically physical figure in a really major athlete.
Will Kemp, also somebody famously ugly as he writes about himself being in this,
his own publication, The Nine Days Wonder, and somebody who makes much of his plain speaking.
He says that he doesn't like to use grand words.
So characters like Balsam and then later characters like Lancelot, Garbo or Dog very clearly wrestle for this hulking physical presence.
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.
But that was not really what was unique about what happened after 1594.
Star players had always had playwrights tailoring parts to them.
And Kemp is, for example, advertised on the cover of printed plays as a feature of those plays in production.
But what I think we start seeing is that this physicality of individual players starts to produce something much more complex.
Something I would like to call relational drama.
A drama where character starts to become not just debateable in terms of its interior motivation,
but debateable in the set of emotions that tie characters together.
Now it's sort of almost kind of considered a bit embarrassing for professional academics.
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
about much grander things like sort of Marxist political forces or something like that.
But character is a technical achievement of, of drama and to to kind of get into the,
the kind of mechanics of drama, of drama and character creation is, I think, a very useful thing.
And who better than to bring us kind of mechanics of drama than Germans?
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.
And he sort of divides this book up in a very kind of fantastically logical way.
So section 1.4. 7 to 1 .4. 19 deals with the functions of character creation.
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.
But anyway, Pfister he says the sort of basic tools for creating character are referential speech and expressive speech.
It says really an early modern drama in Renaissance drama.
These are the two dominant modes, and referential speech is simply speech where somebody is described.
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.
Expressive speech is where a character tells you themselves what they are thinking.
So a soliloquy is the standard form of expressive speech.
If we look at the rude mechanicals scene, we can say, okay, yes,
there are moments where character is in a sense being described as through a referential frame, so to speak.
Is the lady Pyramus must love is a referential statement about character.
I have a bit coming is an expressive statement of character.
It's a character telling you something about themselves.
Now, once you have a set of physical characters,
a degree of complexity enters into those statements because what you have is an explicit statement of character.
I have a beard coming that might be an implicit statement that kind of undercuts that,
which is perhaps you don't quite have very much of a beard yet at all.
So you already start to create, I think,
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.
But one of the things that adds to that is that Shakespeare, after 1594,
starts using techniques of characterisation that are actually not normally associated with Renaissance drama at all.
Manfred Pfister says that really a phenomenon of modern drama and this is partly a palliative characterisation.
Competitive characterisation is where persuasion becomes part of how a character is characterised,
i.e. how they are trying to influence people around them and how they respond to attempts to influence them.
So it's a kind of relational bond. So he says the greater the appellate of characterisation in the scene,
the more acts of persuasion and signs of acknowledgement of persuasion you see in a scene.
So something like Quince is Pyramus is a sweet faced man.
Therefore you need must play Pyramus.
It's giving us implicit and explicit forms of characterisation.
Gives us something about Quint's as a character. It also implicitly tells us something about what kind of character bottom is here too.
Perhaps not such a sweet faced man, but that he might be flattered by such a reference.
And finally, what you have is fanatic speech. Fanatic speech, according to Fest, is really unknown in Renaissance drama, apart from in Shakespeare.
And this is where characters simply speak to fill up the time, to keep the bond between figures, to tie them together.
He says, for example, this is a very striking feature of Beckett's work.
The characters often just sort of burble on to try and fill gaps.
And this is very much a marker of Shakespearean speech. Post 1594.
No faith. Well, no, no. And you may and I may.
That whole sort of network, I think,
allows us to see how something like the rude mechanicals ends up producing not just a distinctive figure in bottom,
but a distinctive community where this group has quite a complicated relationship to someone like Nick Bottom,
who they mourn when he is lost, who is in certain ways boastful, but who's also rather sweet and willing to be helpful,
who everyone sort of looks up to, even as they say, perhaps he tends to go over the top.
What we find in these post 1594 works is I think a kind of very complicated relationship between this physical distinctiveness
and emergent character and the way in which that lends complexity to the interiority of characters themselves.
And we see it in other parts of Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, in the relationship between Helena and Hermia,
the two girls or women who find themselves in the forest of Athens looking for lovers.
And Helena is famously tall and thin and white.
Hermia is low and dark and fierce.
And this is the basis of most of their roles together, as they accuse each other of being,
you know, a puppet or a vixen and a shrew and being called little.
And what you get is also this sort of paradoxical thing, where Hermia, though she be little, is fierce.
And this actually is just starts happening more and more across Shakespeare's plays as you move across.
This is the rehearsal scene or the performance scene, rather, in Love's Labours Lost,
where we get the pageant of the Nine Worthies and Holofernes is this thin figure has been given the role of Alexander the Great,
for which he admits he is or part it, which is a neologism.
It's the first time that word or it it's been used in English.
And I think it's very telling that Shakespeare should have come up with that neologism right at
this moment where he's sort of thinking about the way in which one might cast a work like this.
So he says, I will not be put out of countenance. And then the aristocrats viciously mock his countenance.
Thou hast no face. What is this, a sitting head? The head of a bodkin.
A death's face in a ring. An old Roman coin, scarce, seen half cheek in a brooch.
They have all this kind of abuse that is directed at Holofernes, who's sort of struggling desperately to take on this role.
And then he he has this response, which I think is very characteristically Shakespearean, which is actually sort of rather moving,
rather morally powerful line where he says this is not generous, not gentle, not humble.
Suddenly cuts against that line of abuse.
And I think this physicality of players this way in which Shakespeare is thinking about individuals as he cast his plays,
is part of the key to the way in which his writing changes after 1594.
And you find this even in really relatively minor little playlists within plays such as this,
the momentary row as though to shoot in the second part of Henry four is about to be taken off by a beetle.
This is just a character called The First Beetle. But as Dota2 chief is being taken away,
there is again this mockery of him as this thin figure standing in contrast to the supposedly pregnant, doltish cheat.
Though the beadle denies this and says she just has cushions under her dress.
So the hostess is saying what is the fruit of her womb miscarry?
Again, this is a characteristic mode of speech that the overground hostess tends to have.
The Beatle says, Oh, well, she shall have a dozen cushions again. They have but 11 now.
And the dolls response to this sort of this attack on her own bulk is you rogue?
Come bring me to a justice. Yes, says doll chest.
You starved, bloodhound. Goodman death.
Goodman, bones. Thou anatomy. You know this.
This thin, miserable figure, you thin thing, you rascal.
And Beatles kind of characteristically sort of fatigue space filler of very well, not a moment like this.
It's clear that Shakespeare was thinking of a particular actor, a particular actor who looked thin.
And we can actually tell this because when the play was printed, it was printed from Shakespeare's working papers,
his foul papers, and Shakespeare did not when he first wrote that scene.
Right. First Beatle, he wrote Sinclair, the name of John Sinclair,
an actor in his company who was famously thin, who appears in later plays to as a thin man.
And this. And again, a feature entirely unique to Shakespeare, the slipping in of actors names as he composes.
His tendency to write first for an individual and second to give that character a name.
So throughout this scene, we get synchro, synchro, synchro rather than beetle at all.
Same thing in Much Ado About Nothing. Again, set from Shakespeare's fall papers where the entrances are for camp rather than dog,
Bree and Cowley, another actor in the company rather than Verges.
So Shakespeare, as he is producing that first draft,
is thinking of a set of individuals he knows and the way in which they might work on the stage rather than anything else.
So all of these entrances are a camp, and it was ultimately that set of players who put together Shakespeare's Folio
after his death and put their own names onto the opening pages of the work.
Camp and Cowley, Hemmings and Condell.
The two remember remaining members of the Fellowship were the ones who brought that addition to the press.
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.
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.
And then Robert Almond, who became the comic actor after Kemp left the company in 1600.
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,
but perhaps two young boy actors who are here, perhaps a budding Hermia and Helena, tall and blonde.
And with Burbage, they're standing ready to take on a heroic role.
Shakespeare has his initial thoughts about a new play that has the working title.
A midsummer Night's Dream. Thank you very much.