Elizabethan Theatre II: a Bit of Marlowe and a LOT of Shakespeare

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) has been classified as one of the wits. I separate him because he’s just more talented. He studied

 at Cambridge, where he also apparently was engaged in some unusual and probably secret service for the queen, via her spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. In 1589 he was involved in a murder; and later was investigated on charges of atheism and blasphemy, made by his room-mate, Thomas Kyd (who was in danger of being charged with these himself)!  Marlowe was scheduled to be tried for these offenses, but instead was murdered in a barroom brawl...did he know too much? Indeed, the story of Marlowe’s death has prompted many theories, but none fully solves the mystery of this great talent who died too young.  

        

Fortunately for us, Marlowe had time to write a few great plays that were innovative in that they featured psychologically complex characters (usually who over-reach) and in that he perfected the blank verse form in these plays.  Note these lines from Dr. Faustus:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Her lips suck forth my soul! See where it flies!

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again…

and these, from the last scene – he prays for his life, a prayer that will be denied: .

                        Ah, Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live

And then thou must be damned perpetually.

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease and midnight never come!

Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make

Perpetual day, or let this hour be but

A year, a month, a natural day,

That Faustus may repent and save his soul --

O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!

Marlowe’s “mighty” line…Dr. Faustus is perhaps his greatest play, but also very worth reading and seeing are Edward II, Tamburlaine, and The Jew of Malta (though they’re not as frequently produced as either Faustus or much of Shakespeare). 

Faustus, one of the most re-told stories in dramatic literature, tells of a man who certainly over-reaches, selling his soul to the devil, and though he tries to repent is pulled down to hell. The legend goes back beyond Marlowe, to Germany where in 1509 there was a real Dr. Faustus at the University of Heidelberg, who dabbled in sciences and in magic.  Marlowe probably read a German story on the subject that was translated into English in 1587. 

There’s a story, probably apocryphal, but worth telling, about a performance of the play at Exeter. Apparently in this production one more devil than usual popped up on stage – the actors, terrified, stopped the play, and the audience bolted! You have to remember that the concept of witchcraft and black magic was much more immediate and terrifying to Elizabethans than it is to us.

And then there was William Shakespeare. We don’t know much about his biography, but that hasn’t stopped people from writing all sorts of fact and fiction about it. We know he was christened at Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564, and that he died there on 23 April 1616.  He probably studied at the local grammar school, which focused on Christian ethics and classical literature.  He would have read Plutarch’s Lives of the Greeks and Romans (where he found plots for his Roman plays) and the chronicles of British history (we hashed some of those out earlier), and some philosophy.  We know he was familiar with the plays of Seneca and Plautus, as two of his early plays borrowed immodestly from them:  Titus Andronicus is a bloody Senecan revenge tragedy based on Thyestes; and The Comedy of Errors is based very closely on The Menaechmi.

        

Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582, who lived in a

cottage just outside Stratford in the forest of Arden (As You Like It, anyone?). They had three children – Suzanna, then twins named Hamnet and Judith in 1585. Hamnet died when he was 11 years old.  The next seven years are blank, but in 1592 our poet shows up in London, working in the theatre! 

In fact the first documented writing about Shakespeare in London is an insult written in a pamphlet by one of the University Wits, Robert Greene, whose career had been unhappy and he a drunken failure after Friar Bacon, in which he wrote this warning to his fellow scholars:  

“for there is an upstarte Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country.”   (A Groatsworth of Wit, 1592)

The obvious reference is “Shake-scene,” but even scholars who quibble with that one admit that Greene must have been talking about Shakespeare because he played on a line from Act I scene iv of Henry VI part 3:  “A tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide...” 

        

After this records sketch out a mere skeleton of his life.  By 1594

Shakespeare had become associated with a newly formed theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men; in fact he was a shareholder, one of four or five company members who ran the theatre, were responsible for it, and made the profits from it.  This company became the greatest company of Elizabethan England, and when Elizabeth died in 1603 and James I ascended the throne, he took the company away from the Lord Chamberlain and gave it to -- himself!  In 1604 it became the King’s Men.   

        

Meanwhile, where were the wife and kids?  Back in Stratford -- 

only two hours from London now, by bus or train, but a considerably longer haul on horseback!  Shakespeare did go home occasionally.  He began making decent money in the theatre, so much so that he bought one of the best homes in Stratford, paid his father’s debts, and late in life he retired to his home town, leading the life of a wealthy burgher -- one critic notes that the face on the bust of his memorial is that of a “self-satisfied pork butcher” – where he died in 1616. 

        

After he passed away the world was left with the most important aspect of Shakespeare – his plays! The only complete published version of Shakespeare’s work was presented to the public a full nine years after he died -- 1623.  Two of his fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, wanted to honor their dead friend, so they published what we call the First Folio.  It contains 36 plays, 

18 of which existed in some form already (acting versions, “quartos”), but, except for this edition we would not have half of the plays, among them some of the most popular: As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Macbeth. 

The First Folio was divided into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies, but modern scholars have sought special terms for plays that maynot easily fit into one of those three. Some, often called “problem” plays, are a few of the very DARK comedies (Measure for Measure, 
All’s Well that Ends Well). Others are known as “romances” and identify a few of his very late plays such as The Tempest. Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale.

        

The general style in which Shakespeare wrote is important because Shakespeare created a new style, a precedent for plays that later would be labeled “romantic.”  Not in the sense of romantic love (though Shakespeare featured romantic love in his plays as no one had before him), but as the style contrasts with the neoclassical style we noted in the Italian Renaissance, that focused on verisimilitude, the appearance of truth, on decorum, and on the three unities.

        

Shakespeare’s contemporaries (certainly the university wits) and

Shakespeare himself were aware of these rules for playwriting, but

 felt no need to ape them.  Shakespeare used supernatural characters freely and moved from place to place, kept no unity of time. While he was capable of writing in the neoclassic style (Comedy of Errors keeps to unity of place and action, for example), he usually chooses not to.  Let’s quickly look at the differences between neoclassical and romantic drama:

If Neoclassical plays feature verisimilitude, decorum and the unities, Shakespeare’s proto-Romantic plays feature several plots linked, with battles on stage and dead bodies littering it, with supernatural beings and events such as ghosts and witches. His plays last days, months, even years, and skip from court to country, from one country to another country, from court to battlefield, and so on.

        

With those major differences in mind, let’s look at Shakespeare’s plays, beginning with the histories.  These feature the largest casts,

This terrific RSC production in the mid-70s
featured one of the best design concepts I've seen

often 35 roles, and the loosest structure.  They consist of 2 tetralogies (Richard II, Henry IV 1 & 2, Henry V; and Henry VI 1,2 &3, Richard III) plus King John and Henry VIII.  There is a fine line between some tragedies and some histories.  Some plays that are tragedies deal with the legendary history of Britain (Macbeth, King Lear); and the “Roman” plays, all of which are listed under tragedies in the Folio, include several (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra) that also follow history fairly closely.  While they are the most difficult plays for first-time readers of the Bard, 400 years later these plays are performed regularly. 

        

The tragedies are usually more tightly built than are the histories. They generally follow ONE tragic figure, and are nearly always

 fictional.  The casts are still quite large, averaging according to one person’s math, 27 characters.  One of the innovations Shakespeare made in the tragic form was to inaugurate the tragedy of LOVE.  In classical tragedies love had not been considered a proper subject, and not all of Shakespeare’s tragedies focus on love.  But Romeo and Juliet and Othello certainly do: Othello is 

“one who loved not wisely, but too well...” Romeo and Juliet also breaks ground in the tragic form by focusing on two young people whose families are well off, perhaps, but not figures of public importance. Most of Shakespeare’s tragic figures, however, ARE involved in public matters (the succession of Denmark; the parceling out of a kingdom), but along with this exterior action, there is also a conflict with the inner self: Lear goes mad, Hamlet

 battles madness, fakes madness, ultimately faces himself: “the readiness is all.”  Macbeth’s major antagonist IS himself. Thus however “public” the people, they also show their private most parts. A recent book on Shakespeare (by Harold Bloom) credits him with the ”invention of the human” in theatre. Not that there hadn’t been very human aspects in creations of writers before him, but Shakespeare was the first to flesh out full, believable characters that have been the model ever since. They all take huge risks and in the end they die; and most of the time the community can move forward because of their actions, risks, deaths.

        

If tragedy deals with public actions of great note, comedy deals more usually with private events, and most often with love.

 Compare Shakespeare’s comedy with neoclassical comedy and you’ll see that the lovers, and often the FEMALE lovers, are more important in Shakespeare than in Moliére, for example.  Shakespeare makes popular a romantic comedy (so called this time not only for its “Romantic” structure, but because it deals with affairs of the heart. And even though Lysander may whine that “the course of true love never did run smooth,” by the end of the plays it does, and abundantly. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night end in three marriages, As You Like It with four!

        

Just as there is comedy infused into the most serious Shakespeare, there are dark aspects in much of the comedy.  In fact, as I’ve noted above there are a few plays that are nearly unclassifiable.  I’d opt for the term “disturbingly modern” to describe them, but many critics call them “problem” plays, a prime example of which is All’s Well that Ends Well. But does it end well?  What is Helena’s life going to be like with the egotistical, roving-eyed,

Mark Rylance as the Duke in the
Globe Theatre production

boorish Bertram?  In Measure for Measure Isabella, preparing to become a nun, may be forced to have sex with a repulsive high official as the only way to spare her brother’s life. So she goes to her brother in prison who, instead of defending her honor says to her basically...”well, it might not be all that bad...” These two, especially the latter, are more about the dark underbelly of love than about romance. Troilus and Cressida is another of these troublesomely interesting “problem” plays. There are comic moments, but it’s certainly not a comedy. Nor is it a tragedy.

  

A few other plays that are classed as comedies in the Folio exude a sense of strangeness, adventure, magic far more profound than in the other comedies.  They were written late in Shakespeare’s life, and a major theme that echoes through them is redemption, forgiveness.  In The Tempest, Prospero, having been set adrift with his little daughter to die, whips up a storm and all sorts of trouble, but ultimately puts his “rough magic” aside, forgives those who mistreated him, and arranges a fine marriage for his now grown 

The great Simon Russell Beale (center) played Leontes
Sinead Cusack (right) played Paulina

daughter, Miranda.  In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, a king, imagines that his brother (king of a nearby land) is in love with his own wife; his jealousy and cruelty causes all sorts of awful things to occur, including the death of his wife (but is she REALLY dead?) He sends his daughter out to die in the elements, but unknown to him she’s saved Oedipus style. The scene shifts to 17 years later, and a miracle happens...well, at least it seems to...if played well the restoration of Leontes to his wife is one of the most moving scenes in all of Shakespeare. At least I think it is. And this IS after all theatre history according to Dr Jack!

That Shakespeare is played and played and played after 400 years, and not just in English speaking countries, is amazing. There’s a line in Julius Caesar, just after the conspirators murder Caesar, where Cassius says:

    How many ages hence

    Shall this our lofty scene be acted over

    In states unborn and accents yet unknown...

Of course he’s referring to their act of killing a tyrant, but but it applies perfectly to Shakespeare’s plays in performance. “Oh [his] prophetic soul!” There’s a good reason for their resilience – they’re theatrical as hell!  His plots are some of the strongest ever built, but the plays are peopled with, as we’ve discussed, some of the most filled out, breathing beings ever captured in a quarto! 

Peter Brook's groundbreaking production, in 1970 "in a great white box")        

Shakespeare’s plots feature a relatively early point of attack, which means that more of the action is shown rather than narrated through exposition (as in a Neoclassical play). If a Neoclassic writer had got hold of the story of Hamlet, what we’d see on stage is the day that Hamlet fights Laertes and dies.  Lengthy soliloquies would have told us what happened in the past...act one scene one, the ghost of Hamlet’s father goes on for 5 pages...instead, Shakespeare begins Hamlet JUST as he’s got back to Elsinore after his father’s death...exposition?  First line: ”Who’s there!” a sword comes out and we immediately plunge into action!

They say if you touch her right breast you'll fall in love

Shakespeare uses foreshadowing EARLY in the play to prepare the audience for the climax...you always know what to hope for or fear in Shakespeare...”Beware the Ides of March!”  Romeo tells us early on that he fears that

    Some consequence yet hanging in the stars

    Shall bitterly begin his fateful date

    with this night’s revels...

It doesn't say anyone will love you back...C'est la guerre!

and Iago tells the audience step by step exactly what he’s going to do...you say “Nyaaah..”  and then it happens!

        

Towards the end of nearly every play Shakespeare features a brilliant coup de theatre – something that will shock or surprise us.

Pacino as Shylock, NYSF, then Broadway 2010

 Some are better than others. In The Merchant of Venice Antonio’s breast is bared, Shylock is ready with a sharp knife to strike, when Portia stops him with her clever trick. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, just when it looks as if all four sets of lovers will get together, Mercade enters in black and in one of the great tiny roles in history tells the young princess “The King your father’s dead.”  And love’s labour IS lost. My favorite is Othello, where from somewhere or other (and each good production prides itself on the surprise of this moment) Othello pulls out that dagger, stabs himself , and dies, as he says, “upon a kiss.”

It doesn’t get much better than that!  Read Shakespeare!

Finally, have a look, if you like, at a piece that English journalist Bernard Levin concocted by putting together familiar Shakespearean phrases. It shows just how many expressions in our language come from terms and phrases coined by Shakespeare, and I at least think it’s rather fun:

“If you cannot understand my argument and declare, ‘it’s Greek to me,’ you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare;  if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made virtue a necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed  yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing; if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise -- why be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare;  If you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you think the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then -- to give the devil his due -- if truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; 

even if you bid me good riddance, and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony hearted villain, bloody minded or a blinking idiot, then -- by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness sake! what the dickens! but me no buts -- it is all one to me, for you are quoting --- Shakespeare!”

Next up? Other writers of the era and the Elizabethan public playhouse!