Stanley
Wells,
Shakespeare & Co. Christopher
Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas
Middleton, John Fletcher, and the Other Players
in His Story.
Pantheon Books,
2006
(Issued in the US, April, 2007)
Stanley Wells is one of the great Shakespeare scholars of this, or any other, generation. His work on the Oxford edition of the Complete Works, the Textual Companion, the Dictionary of Shakespeare and, if I can mention a personal favorite, Shakespeare for All Time, assure his enduring reputation. It was with keen anticipation I picked up this book, then, and I was not disappointed. The book is not groundbreaking, by any means, but is pleasant, erudite, and consistently interesting. It is the best introduction I know to placing Shakespeare in the theatrical currents of his time and tracing his interactions, such as they can be known, with his less famous, though greatly gifted, contemporaries Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, Fletcher, Webster and the rest.
In an age such as ours where otherwise serious people can become preoccupied with crank, dilettantish ideas like the Oxford wrote Shakespeare nonsense so much in circulation, how likely is it those same serious people have taken the time to read Shakespeare's less well known fellows? They have, perhaps, read Dr. Faustus in an English lit survey class, and know about Marlowe because, after all, HE might, just maybe, be the one who really wrote at least some of Shakespeare's plays, but certainly they have not read either part of Tamburlaine, or A Trick To Catch The Old One, or The Shoemakers Holiday. Need enough, then, that a thoroughgoing, popular introduction to the lives and masterpieces of some of Shakespeare's contemporaries deserves a home on the bulging Shakespeare bookshelf at the Barnes & Nobles cum Starbucks.
The first sentence of the Preface says "This book attempts to place Shakespeare in relation to the actors and other writers, mainly playwrights, of his time in an accessible and where possible entertaining manner" (ix). And so it does, with, speaking for myself, at least, emphasis on "entertaining." I found the book enormously likable. If you are familiar with the period and the authors being treated, you will find nothing new, but a non-specialists book surveying a rather broad field does not attempt to present novel interpretations, but rather can be relied on to deliver the state-of-the-art scholarly understanding of these authors and their works in a pleasant style. Wells's scholarly status guarantees the most dependable understanding of the times and writers, and his gifts as a writer makes reading a joy.
He begins by sketching the theatrical scene around 1600-01, placing Shakespeare astride two generations of writers, the earlier Elizabethan journeymen like Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly and (much more than a journeyman) Marlowe, and the later generation of Jacobeans, Chapman, Jonson, Middleton, Fletcher and Webster. Wells's style is conversational, but spiced with intimate knowledge of the people, the period, and the great edifice of English Literature: "Soon after it [Hamlet] took the town by storm the Cambridge Scholar and controversialist Gabriel Harvey (1552/3-1631) -- an intellectual snob if ever there was one -- scribbled in his copy of Chaucer's poems a note to the effect that 'The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, but his Lucrece, and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort" (3). The tone is light "an intellectual snob if ever there was one," exact "his copy of Chaucer's poems," and to the point, placing Shakespeare's reputation broad and high midway through his career.
Wells traces the background of Elizabethan play houses, the social context, mentioning the criticisms of Stephen Gosson and the School of Abuse, but comes down on the side of a balanced view of players and play goers during Shakespeare's career, noting the demands Elizabethan and Jacobean plays made on their auditors: "...there is no other period in which so much of the finest writing, in both verse and prose, is to be found in plays written for the popular theatre" (27); and defending, for the most part, the players, recognizing the stolid citizenship and industry of men like Hemminges, Condell, Phillips, especially Edward Alleyn, and certainly Shakespeare, while leaving room for the more liberal spirits, like Will Kemp and, indeed, Ben Jonson. The theatre crowd of the 1580s-1620s had a mixture of industry and profligacy, just as it has today, with men of high intellect writing for the stage more lyrically, wittily and powerfully than ever before or since.
We learn, charmingly, that "...in the public theatres plays were acted without a break, in the private theatres they were customarily divided into five acts, for the practical reason that candles used for illumination had to be trimmed at frequent intervals" (17). And touchingly, regarding the death of Shakespeare's great fellow Richard Burbage, "Two months later the Earl of Pembroke, who with his brother was to be a dedicatee of the First Folio, was still so distressed that he could not bring himself to join in the after dinner festivities at a great banquet which was to be followed by a performance of Pericles, in which Burbage had probably created the leading role; the Earl wrote that 'I being tender-hearted, could not endure to see [the play] so soon after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbage'" (47).
Wells emphasizes Shakespeare's role as a collaborator throughout the book:
"Scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge this, but there is now fairly general agreement that in his early years he worked with George Peele on Titus Andronicus and with Thomas Nashe on Henry VI, Part One. He also seems likely to have written some scenes of Edward III...he apparently worked with Thomas Middleton on Timon of Athens, with John Fletcher on the play known in its own time as All is True, retitled Henry VIII...The Two Noble Kinsmen, and on a lost play, Cardenio...Pericles is now agreed to be a collaboration with George Wilkins, and Middleton apparently had a share in both Measure for Measure and Macbeth, but as an adapter rather than as a collaborator" (26).
It behooves us, then, to find out more about these men and their relationship to Shakespeare's works.
Christopher Marlowe
After reviewing the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical scenes, and placing Shakespeare squarely among his fellow actors, Wells begins a series of chapters examining the leading playwrights of the age, as playwrights, but also in their relationship to Shakespeare. First up is the greatest, at least the greatest of the 16th century except for Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe. By way of introducing Marlowe brief consideration is made of Lyly ("In later times the compulsory reading of Euphues and its sequel came to be used as a form of punishment suitable for uppish undergraduates..." (64)); Greene ("Greene was so much a master of the journalistic skill of turning anything that happened to him into copy for the printers that it is difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction in his writing..." (66)); Lodge ( "...he sailed on voyages to the Azores, the Canary Islands and South America. It was at sea that he wrote...Rosalynde [source for As You Like It]" (69); Peele (Peele's eclectic style has caused his name to be associated with many anonymous plays of the period and, conspicuously, with one that is not anonymous, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus" (70)); Nashe ("Nashe was a genius, a brilliant if eccentric prose stylist and satirist whose linguistic innovations vie3 with those of James Joyce..." (70-71)); and Kyd ("Shakespeare may well have written Titus Andronicus in direct emulation of this play [Kyd's Spanish Tragedy], which combines tragedy with black comedy and sensational horror" (75)).
Marlowe (at last) is "...the only writer of his time to whom Shakespeare makes direct reference" (75). An amazing fact for such a bookish man as Shakespeare. Wells goes on to compare Venus and Adonis with Hero and Leander (which Marlowe may well have allowed him to read in manuscript). In fact both works gained a reputation as "soft porn" in their time. Wells concludes that "...it is quite likely that Marlowe and Shakespeare were friends" (77). After comparing their formative years--at least, the little that is known of them--and their early careers--ditto--Wells states "it seems certain that if Shakespeare had died when Marlowe did [1593], we should now regard Marlowe as the greater writer" (78). It would certainly not be so in another five years. In fact, in another five years, when Meres wrote Palladis Tamia naming Shakespeare's works to date, Shakespeare had become the greatest of all English playwrights--even had he not gone on to produce his greatest works from 1599-1611.
From a comparison of the two, Wells proceeds to analyze, in a light and friendly way, of course, the works of Marlowe, focusing on the "magnificence and grandiloquence" of his language. Of The Jew of Malta he says, "T. S. Eliot had read the play correctly in 1920, writing that if we take it 'as a farce, then the concluding act becomes intelligible..." (86). It is, in Wells's words, "sardonic, black comedy." Interestingly, Wells draws a parallel between Barabas's ultimate boasts "Die, life! Fly, soul! Tongue, curse thy fill and die!" (actually, the speech from 5.5.80-88) with Burbage playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, perhaps imitating Alleyn, with:
My soul is in the sky.
Tongue, lose thy light;
Moon, take thy flight.
Now, die, die, die, die, die!
It is comparisons such as these that make reading Wells book so much fun. Only a scholar of good will, if I may, can be depended upon to represent the period faithfully while drawing such striking echoes so convincingly.
Shakespeare's play that invites comparison with The Jew of Malta is, of course, the Merchant of Venice. Of the two, Wells judges, "Shakespeare's play is greater in stylistic range and in emotional depth than Marlowe's, and gentler in it morality" (89). And so it is. Isn't that why we admire Marlowe--for his language, certainly, and his heightened histrionics--but we love gentle Shakespeare, not so much for his far greater linguistic gifts, but for his compassion, empathy, and kindlier depths?
Another example of Wells's breadth of knowledge is his comparison of Marlowe and Richard Barnfield: "There is only one poet of the 1590s whose interest in homoeroticism is comparable to Marlowe's" (94). Ironically, Barnfield is best remembered for his praise of Shakespeare's Venus and Lucrece in A Remembrance of Some English Poets (1598). This is mentioned in the broader context of an analysis of Marlowe's Edward II, and his homoeroticism in general.
After a discussion of Marlowe's works, he goes on to the famous death in Deptford. Many far flung theories are spun around the death. "Many readers of the documents have speculated that Marlowe may have been the victim of an undisclosed conspiracy..." (100). As ridiculous as the de Vere theories are today, so have been (and still are in less lavishly funded circles) the Marlowe wrote Shakespeare theories in years past. In the twenty years after his death, he is alleged to have written the masterpieces of Shakespeare, "...which no one in the busy, and gossipy world of the theatre knew to be his, and for which he was willing to allow his Stratford contemporary to receive all the credit and to reap all the rewards" (100). Interestingly, "Calvin Hoffman, an American journalist...had the Walsingham tomb opened in the attempt to find documentary proof..." (101). It makes for light entertainment, but is all such a silly waste of time. There is absolutely no doubt, Wills makes clear, that Marlowe died a violent death in Deptford in 1593.
Though Marlowe was, as Wells describes, a rioter, forger, heretic, blasphemer, secret agent and social dissident, his death was an enormous loss to English literature. He "was not solitary genius" however, and a new generation of dramatists was soon to emerge.
Thomas Dekker
Thus, Wells segues to a consideration of Thomas Dekker, "The first prominent dramatist whose work centres on the capital..." (107). He was enormously prolific, often in collaboration, and wrote "throughout his adult life, except for the seven years that he spent in prison." Indeed, Wells summarizes his work (ala Shapiro) in the year 1599 alone, and it is truly amazing, including his masterpiece The Shoemaker's Holiday, based on The Gentle Craft, a novella published in 1598 by Thomas Deloney. "Overall, then, Dekker was involved to some degree or other in the composition of no fewer than eleven plays in 1599" (110).
Dekker--along with several others--had a hand in Sir Thomas More, the holograph of which contains the only sample, it is commonly believed by scholars, of Shakespeare's handwriting (the famous Hand D). The composition of Sir Thomas More, though, was a much looser affair than one we would call a collaboration.
Dekker lived to be sixty, and in his later life collaborated with Thomas Middleton, who succeeded Shakespeare as the King's Men's chief playwright, on two fine plays, The Honest Whore and The Roaring Girl. The latter play (probably 1611) "...is based on a real-life London character, Mary Frith, also known as Moll Cutpurse...Reputedly the first woman to smoke tobacco..." (121). She is presented sympathetically, "as a kind of female Robin Hood."
Dekker's most famous prose work is the Gull's Hornbook, in which he writes about the London theatre world. "Dekker's chapter called 'How a gallant should behave himself in a playhouse' is full of vivid and revealing details about theatre practice" (123). The gallant, of course, should sit on the stage. If the playwright "has satirized him or flirted with his mistress, the gallant may take his revenge by standing up in the middle of the play ' with a screwed and discontented face', greeting all his friends who are on the stage with him, and persuading as many of them as may be to depart with him" (124), and so on.
Dekker was able to transfer his skills, and "continue his lifelong celebration of the City of London" in pageants and other entertainments. "In 1629 the Ironmongers' Company paid him 180 pounds for writing London's Tempe, or, The Field of Happiness..." (127). A surprising amount. The saddest episode in Dekker's life was the seven years he spent in prison for debt, and at the ending of his life, he had nothing. His widow indicated that "...he had nothing to leave to posterity except his writings" (128).
Ben Jonson
"Ben Jonson was the most aggressively self-opinionated, conceited, quarrelsome, vociferous and self-advertising literary and theatrical figure of his time" (129). And those were his good qualities... No, that's a joke. Wells goes on to call Ben a "powerful satirist, a lyric poet of genius, a playwright of great though uneven achievement...a classical scholar..." and so on. We know Shakespeare by his surname, but Jonson is always "Ben." Partly, because we know so much about him, but moreso because he mirrors so much about us, and laughs at us to boot.
Jonson began, stepping up from bricklayer's apprentice, as an actor. Soon he was playing Heironimo from The Spanish Tragedy, on tour. His first play, The Case is Altered, he regarded so lightly as to exclude from his 1616 Folio edition of "works." (He took many a jibe from his fellows for publishing Works, with a capital W. He was jailed in the Marshalsea for his part in the now lost play The Isle of Dogs, and it nearly got the playhouses pulled down. Thereafter he killed a fellow actor (Gabriel Spencer, with whom he had served six weeks for the Isle of Dogs episode) in a duel. He was imprisoned again, and almost hung. He escaped by pleading benefit of clergy, a legal loophole for literates. His goods were confiscated and he was branded with Tyburn's T on this thumb. For these, and a hundred other reasons, we know him as Ben.
Jonson's criticisms of Shakespeare are well known, and it is worth mentioning that Shakespeare never answered in kind, though Wells speculates that "...possibly Jonson was thought to be satirized in the bragging and doltish figure of Ajax in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida..." (139). Certainly he wore his autodidactical classicism ostentatiously. So much so, that his original text for Sejanus, his stiff Roman tragedy, was rewritten for performance (the performance text is lost) and Wells quotes Ann Barton's guess that the collaborator was Shakespeare, which may well have been the case, but, Wells is quick to point out, there is no proof. One of Wells's fascinating speculations is that Jonson arranged the scholarly side notes in the printed edition of Sejanus "...to draw attention away from the play's topical resonances..." (145).
Most of Jonson's plays are comedies, much more satirical and topical than Shakespeare's. He was in trouble again for Eastward Ho, which he wrote with Chapman and Marston. The play's gibes against the Scots landed the three authors in prison, under threat of personal mutilation (a not uncommon "corrective" in Jacobean times). After Eastward Ho, Jonson's great creative period brought forth Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, the plays we best know. Wells compares this output with Shakespeare's of the same period. With Shakespeare turning to Romance and densely complex poetry, Jonson stuck with his forte, classicism, satire and topical events. Ben famously expressed criticisms of Shakespeare, "The gist of Jonson's criticism is that Shakespeare lacked discipline..." (161), but it should be noted, "...he expresses nothing but admiration for Shakespeare as a man."
Jonson turned to masque writing between 1616 (the year of his Folio) and 1626, collaborating closely--if precariously--with the great designer Inigo Jones. Other well known authors of the time also wrote masques, as was the fashion, but by then it was too late for Shakespeare. Jonson returned to play writing near the end of his life, with plays relatively unknown today: The Staple of News, The New Inn and A Tale of a Tub. He died in 1637, at sixty-five. Wells observes: "For the remainder of the seventeenth century Jonson's reputation and influence equaled and possibly exceeded Shakespeare's, but in the eighteenth century the balance shifted, above all with the virtual deification of Shakespeare from the time of the Garrick Jubilee, in 1769, onwards" (165).
Thomas Middleton
Wells quotes Ben Jonson's Prologue to Volpone, where Ben boasts of writing the play in:
five weeks fully penned it--
From his own hand, without a co-adjutor,
Novice, journeyman or tutor.
He seizes on these four terms to characterize Thomas Middleton's changing relationship with Shakespeare. In time, he played all four roles. Shakespeare was his tutor, and Middleton was Shakespeare's apprentice (of sorts), journeyman and collaborator (see p. 167-168).
Middleton's early plays were written for the boys' companies, and Wells speculates interestingly on the attraction of the young actors: "Their performances may have had the appeal of miniaturization, an effect not unlike that produced by seeing a Mozart opera performed by puppets" (171).
In addition to plays Middleton authored pamphlets, much like Dekker (in fact they borrowed heavily from one another). With The Honest Whore, however, written with Dekker, Middleton hit his play writing stride, and followed it with "brilliant comedies": Michaelmas Term (1604), A Trick to Catch the Old One, A Mad World My Masters (both in 1605) The Puritan Widow (1606) and Your Five Gallants (1607), all city comedies and all written for the boys' companies.
Wells speculates that Middleton probably wrote A Yorkshire Tragedy ("...among the finest one-act plays in English" (179)). He also treats The Revenger's Tragedy as Middleton's, though cautiously ("...the long-held suspicion that Middleton wrote the earlier play has hardened into conviction in many scholars' minds..." (180)--certainly not a thoroughgoing endorsement0, if for no other reason than to enjoy the luxury of analyzing this wonderful play.
Wells also says that Shakespeare accepted Middleton "...as a coadjutor on Timon of Athens" (184). He speculates that maybe the success of The Revenger's Tragedy, "...quite possibly with Shakespeare in the cast--encouraged him [Shakespeare] to accept Middleton, sixteen years his junior, as a kind of senior apprentice" (184). The idea that Shakespeare and Middleton collaborated on Timon is, Wells tells us, "now strongly supported" among scholars (185). Wells's concludes: "The collaboration on this play between Shakespeare and his younger colleague may not have been entirely happy; indeed it is quite likely that they gave it up as a bad job before the play was complete. So far as we know it was not acted in its own time..." (187).
Wells goes on to describe Middleton's great plays for the adult companies, The Roaring Girl, No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's, The Second Maiden's Tragedy, The Lady's Tragedy and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, notable for "...eleven speaking female characters on stage at once" (189). As interesting as these plays are, Wells does not spend time on them, but brings us back go our theme of Middleton's relationship with Shakespeare. He cites Middleton's The Witch, and inclusions of parts of it in Macbeth. In fact, Wells states "...there are other reasons to suppose that the text as we have it [of Macbeth] may be an adaptation" (190), by Middleton, of course. "The other Shakespeare play which, modern scholarship indicates, Middleton may have adapted is Measure for Measure" (190). The adaptation, Wells indicates, based on the best modern opinion, was made around 1621 (191).
Middleton's play writing career ended with the vivid A Game at Chess (1624), which is vigorously anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish. "Few plays ever written have caused such a scandal" (192). The Spanish ambassador complained, and Middleton "...may have been imprisoned [he was absent when the actors were reprimanded by the Privy Council] and released on condition that he give up playwriting..." (192). It was, indeed, his last work for the stage, though he continued to author pageants and entertainments for the city.
John Fletcher
"The only dramatist with whom, on the basis of evidence likely to be accepted in a court of law, it can confidently be said that Shakespeare collaborated is...John Fletcher (1579-1625) (p. 194). The name Fletcher can hardly be pronounced, however unfair, without the name Beaumont. As young men, Aubry, that irrepressible 17th century gossip says "They lived together on the Bankside, not far from the playhouse, both bachelors; lay together; had one wench in the house between them...the same clothes and cloak etc. between them" (quoted by Wells, p. 195). In all likelihood they would not mind their names coupled in evergreen remembrance. In 1613 Beaumont married and the bachelor household thrived no more.
In the chapter on Fletcher Wells also brings in George Wilkins. "Everything points to this [Pericles]having been a collaborative play" (200), and the shadowy Wilkins, scholars are certain, was the collaborator. He "was a violent character, frequently in court" and "an unlikely collaborator for respectable Master Shakespeare," but so, apparently, he was. Wilkins was responsible for the first two acts, and Shakespeare the rest.
When Shakespeare was turning to romance, Beaumont and Fletcher were rising in popularity with their tragicomedies, for example Philaster and A King and No King. Around 1610 Fletcher "...engaged directly with Shakespeare...in the only dramatic sequel to any of his plays written before the Restoration" (202). Wells is speaking of The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed where Petruccio remarries and the new wife asserts her independence. The play is an outstanding endorsement of equality and mutual love within marriage, usually not ascribed to the age.
Shakespeare and Fletcher apparently had an affinity that reached beyond their mutual financial interests in the success of the King's Men. They collaborated on Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio. These plays followed collaborations with Wilkins on Pericles and Middleton on Timon of Athens. In his forties, Shakespeare, for reasons unknown, became a collaborator as he had been in his early career. His great plays, however, are without question sole authorships. As Wells points out: "There is no reason to believe that he collaborated with any other writer from 1594 till the composition of Timon of Athens, maybe in 1606" (208-9).
Cardenio, of which we possess a "thoroughly rewritten version dating from 1728" was a Shakespeare and Fletcher collaboration. Henry VIII, another collaboration with Fletcher, "literally brought the house down." It was at a performance of this play, on June 29, 1613 that the Globe burnt to the ground.
After Shakespeare's death in 1616 Fletcher took over as the chief dramatist for the King's Men, and "...was to write a long stream of successful plays, almost always in tandem with another writer--first with the former boy actor Nathan Field and then...with Phillip Massinger with whom he composed some seventeen plays" (220). After Fletcher's death (from plague) Massinger succeeded him as chief dramatist of the King's Men and "...on his death in March, 1640 he joined his old friend in the church, reputedly in the same grave. A single memorial stone now commemorates them there" (221).
John Webster
Wells, as a near coda, examines briefly the work of John Webster, calling his chapter "The Succession." Other than Shakespeare, no Jacobean wrote greater tragedies than Webster, though Wells does not go so far. His White Devil and Duchess of Malfi are the only ones of the period that seriously contend with Shakespeare's in artistic merit. Webster was clearly a disciple: "The Duchess of Malfi, too, reverberates with Shakespearean echoes..." (227); "Antony and Cleopatra may well have helped Webster to shape the structure of The Duchess of Malfi" (229).
After glancing at Webster's two great plays, Wells mentions the later Jacobeans, Ford, Davenant, Shirley, and Brome, but has little to say about them. There are well beyond Shakespeare's days, though he influenced them mightily, as he has every writer since, dramatist or not. This is the end of Wells's story. Beyond this, he tacks on some very interesting documents, or more accurately, document extracts: Duties of the Master of the Revels; An Inventory of Theatrical Properties; a letter by Edward Alleyn on Tour; Warrant from a Nobleman Seeking Permission for His Company of Players to Perform on Tour; An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players; Simon Forman at the Theatre; A Sonnet on the Pitiful Burning of the Globe Playhouse in London; and The Character of a Virtuous Player. They are most welcome, a little scholarly gift at the end of a popular treatise, fascinating all.
This book is an outstanding introduction to Shakespeare's relationship to
his fellows. Deep analysis is eschewed for a survey of the most interesting
facts and theories about these great dramatists. As I said at the outset, I
know of no better introduction to the major figures of the time as they
stood in relationship to Shakespeare. This is an excellent book, from a
trustworthy scholar, especially for those new to many of Shakespeare's
contemporaries.
