This wasn’t the invention of William Shakespeare or any of his immediate contemporaries: as we have already seen, there were Tudor writers, from both the Catholic and the Protestant sides, who led the way from morality plays to the modern drama, and who were highly classically trained as well. Yet when the full colour of the theatrical revolution arrives, it does feel like magic. It happens remarkably fast. The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd arrives in the mid-1580s; so do the first plays by Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage and the two parts of Tamburlaine, whose amoral plot provoked Shakespeare and whose thundering blank verse thrilled him. And we are off, though it will take Shakespeare himself some years before he puts on his first play, almost certainly Henry VI Part One. The first successful commercial theatre, called rather prosaically the Theatre, was opened by James Burbage in Shoreditch in 1576. The following year it was rivalled by the Curtain, and then came the Rose, the Swan and eventually, in 1599, the Globe.
It may not have felt like a revolution at the time. There had been plenty of plays put on in private theatres and in the relative privacy of the inns of court, as well as in the houses of grandees. And in towns around England plays had been performed out of doors too. The first English play in blank verse, the famously abominable Gorboduc, about a disputed succession to the throne, was performed at the Inner Temple before Queen Elizabeth as early as 1561. Far from being rarities, actors and acting companies were known throughout the country – they even travelled abroad, touring Germany and Denmark. And yet in little more than two decades what feels like a new art form was established, spread and produced a flood of astonishing work, much of which is still performed and enjoyed today.
It’s hard to avoid the thought that this is one of the great triumphs of early capitalism. One of Shakespeare’s best recent biographers, Stephen Greenblatt, explains why. A population of London’s size, tempted by big new theatres, produced intense competition: ‘To survive economically it was not enough to mount one or two successful plays a season and keep them up for reasonable runs. The companies had to induce people, large numbers of people, to get in the habit of coming to the theatre again and again, and this meant a constantly changing repertoire, as many as five or six plays per week. The sheer magnitude of the enterprise is astonishing: for each company, approximately twenty new plays per year in addition to some twenty plays carried over from previous seasons.’ If you want to know why Shakespeare wrote so many plays, and had a hand in so many others, there is the reason. Money, advance, security, competition: to that extent, he lived in our world.
Before the Elizabethan theatres opened, there were relatively few openings for clever writers who weren’t already rich, or had very rich patrons. Like the law and the Church, most of the roads to material advancement were blocked off by medieval regulations, by the ‘squatter’s rights’ of well-established families, and by the rigidly hierarchical nature of early modern society itself. The old stories have it that Shakespeare fled to London after being caught poaching deer. Certainly his father’s business was struggling, and even leaving aside his probable Catholic sympathies there wasn’t much for him in Stratford. In London, however, coins could come tumbling into the hands of those who were ambitious, talented and hard-working enough to give the people what they wanted. You didn’t need, necessarily, a grand patron – though almost all the companies had them, as a form of insurance and protection. What you needed was a buzz, curiosity and persistence. Very quickly a new market was formed. It was a highly competitive one. Write a bad play, or still worse, a boring play, and you were punished by empty places. Write a hit, and then another hit, and your name alone would draw the crowds.
Like modern television drama and cinema, this was entertainment which spanned the entire class structure, delighting Queen Elizabeth as well as illiterate boy apprentices. The theatre in Shakespeare’s day still had plenty of formidable enemies. They certainly included servants of the state, paranoid about threats to the monarchy and the established order, as well as the puritans, who abominated all secular entertainments. And then there was the worst enemy of all, bubonic plague, whose regular visitations shut theatres, like other centres of mingling humanity, almost immediately. But above all there was a market, there was opportunity. And there had, therefore, to be product.
Shakespeare’s England was still a land of martyrdom, spies and relentless, dangerous conflict between Protestants and Catholics. As early Protestant martyrs such as Anne Askew had been dealt with by Catholic authorities, so now in Elizabethan England, Catholics were treated. A lot of painstaking and learned research has been expended on the question of whether William Shakespeare himself was a Catholic, as if even today rival teams are desperate to recruit him posthumously onto their side. All that seems certain is that he and his family were deeply riven. His father, as one of the key civic officials in Stratford-upon-Avon, was directly involved in the Reformation programme of smashing Catholic statues, whitewashing churches and sacking Catholic officials. On the other hand, he was almost certainly married to a Catholic woman, and a Catholic ‘Confession of Faith’ was found hidden in the roof of his house long after his death. He helped recruit Catholic teachers to his son’s school, and got into trouble for failing to turn up regularly to Protestant worship, though that may have been more about embarrassment over his debts than religious belief. At any rate, he was a conflicted figure.
If, as seems likely, Shakespeare himself went to work as a teacher in northern Catholic houses before he came to London, then we must assume he had dangerously un-Protestant views of his own as a young man. Schoolfellows a little older than him fled to the Continent and returned as Catholic agents, and were duly hunted down, tortured and torn apart on the scaffold. Relatives were accused and publicly executed as well – Shakespeare may have seen their heads still rattling on poles when he first entered London across its famous bridge. The recent rediscovery of one of his First Folio collections of plays in France, where it had been in a Jesuit library, has highlighted his links with underground, Catholic England.
There are little hints and glints of Catholic teaching in Shakespeare’s plays – most famously in Hamlet – but there is little real echo of the heart-racingly urgent and dangerous politics of contemporary religion. That should surprise nobody: Shakespeare was working under the watchful eyes of government censors and in front of a largely Protestant audience. His likely first company, the Queen’s Players, had partly been formed to spread Protestant propaganda. All England was alive with special agents, or ‘searchers’, and the government’s fears were not unjustified – in 1580 Pope Gregory XIII had declared that the assassination of Queen Elizabeth would not be a mortal sin, inciting English Catholics to a coup.
However, just as in the reign of Henry VIII, the religious war did produce some seriously good poetry, this time mainly from the point of view of the harried and desperate Catholic losers. It’s perfectly possible that Shakespeare met the charismatic Jesuit agent and scholar Edmund Campion, who bravely debated with Protestant divines after he’d been tortured and imprisoned. He was confronted by Elizabeth herself, and later died the usual agonising death. Robert Southwell of Norfolk was one of the Jesuits in another mission, shortly after Campion, and came to a similar end, imprisoned, tortured and then hanged, drawn and quartered in 1595. A textual comparison by some scholars suggests that Southwell, connected to Shakespeare’s famous patron the (Campion-befriending) Earl of Southampton, was an author who Shakespeare read closely. In the following extraordinary poem, penned in that year, while Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, Southwell compares himself to a pounded nutmeg, and defiantly proclaims his martyrdom:
The pounded spise both tast and scent doth please;
In fadinge smoke the force doth incense showe;
The perisht kernell springeth with increase;
The lopped tree doth best and soonest