The perusal of two new offerings from the ever-churning mill of academic studies on the Elizabethan theater had me musing over the strange fact that art doesn’t get better over the centuries, it simply mutates. Picasso, for instance, was not a better artist than Giotto; he was simply different. Le Corbusier was not a better architect than Bernini. One could come up with countless such examples, and the principle covers all the arts. But nowhere, perhaps, is the case more obvious than with Shakespeare: he appeared at the very beginning of the modern theatrical tradition, in which dramatic production was for the first time in a millennium untethered from the strictures of the Church, and in spite of more than four hundred years of experimentation and innovation since then, he remains, as yet, unequaled.
Why? Was Shakespeare’s preeminence simply a result of individual genius, or was there something about the creative process in the sixteenth-century theater that especially encouraged its flowering? Did the highly collaborative nature of the writing and rehearsal process at that time somehow contribute to its quality? Did the relative anonymity accorded authors enhance their creative freedom?
Of the two new books in question, one is written by a veteran academic superstar. Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival[1] is a fascinating study of Christopher Marlowe and his place in the period and the literary canon, of which more later. The other, The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare,[2] is by a relative newcomer, Daniel Swift, a British academic who holds a BA from Oxford and a PhD from Columbia University; I presume that he studied there with James Shapiro, perhaps the preeminent American Shakespearean, since the book is dedicated to him.
Swift’s book is an uneasy hybrid, essentially an academic study masquerading as a popular history and put out by a major trade publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The volume’s unthreatening aspect will probably induce many a casual reader to purchase it, but it will not please everyone, for a large part of the text deals with abstruse subjects like land tenure and obscure lawsuits and will be stultifyingly boring to the lay reader, a category in which I include myself. And like the more accessible works by his mentor Shapiro, Swift’s book is necessarily padded with conjecture and speculation—sometimes gross speculation, real stretches in fact. For in spite of the scholarly industry of centuries we still know very little about Shakespeare himself.
But for the reader who is willing to suffer its longueurs, The Dream Factory delivers some valuable information. Its focus is on “the Theatre,” the first purpose-built playhouse in England, and its founding family the Burbages, as well as on the great playwright himself. (As Swift points out, at that time there was not even a word for “playwright.”) “If we begin by seeing [Shakespeare] as exceptional,” he says, “we can only end with an enigma, and he can only be an isolated figure.” True; and Swift has done a good job of placing the neophyte writer in the cultural and commercial setting of late-sixteenth-century London.
For the rapidly changing culture had everything to do with Shakespeare’s success and the nature of his work. “Seeing Shakespeare among the Burbages is to see him less as the aloof genius celebrated by romantic poets since the nineteenth century and instead as a cannier figure who belonged within and emerged from the restlessness of his age.” Yes indeed; and the word “restlessness” is particularly apt. The London of that time was undergoing a seismic change in which the personal bonds that had held together patron and client, colleague and competitor for centuries were in the process of crumbling: a new system, later to be dubbed capitalism, was taking its place.
There were no professional acting companies in the modern sense in the early 1570s; instead, various aristocratic patrons organized touring companies of players who were nominally members of their own households, groups such as “Pembroke’s Men,” “Leicester’s Men,” etc. But in 1572 the Crown revived a long-forgotten act by which members of an aristocratic household were required to be actual household servants of the aristocrat in question; actors, newly unmoored from their patrons, were deemed “vagrants” and subject to punishment, sometimes horrific ordeals that included branding. The strict Protestants who controlled the City of London hated and feared the acting profession in any case; as one Puritan claimed, speaking for many, actors were “masters of vice, teachers of wantonness, spurs to impurity, the sons of idleness.” Playing was banned within the City walls in 1575.
The solution clearly was to find suitable venues outside the walls. Inns were the traditional places for playing, but there were few suitable ones in the suburbs. James Burbage’s decision to erect a purpose-built space in Shoreditch (in present-day Curtain Road, in the London borough of Hackney) proved intelligent. He called it “the Theatre,” derived from the ancient Greek “théātron”; the name would catch on. Burbage’s venture, the first of its kind, marked a new and decidedly independent way of producing entertainment. Aristocratic touring companies continued; Queen Elizabeth, unlike the Puritans in the City, approved of theatrical performances, feeling perhaps that they kept the ever-dangerous London mobs harmlessly occupied. She even formed her own company later on, the Queen’s Men, snapping up most of the popular actors of the day for its ranks. James Burbage had been a player with Leicester’s Men for a decade in the 1560s and ’70s, but he had decided against continuing in a touring company; for him, “the future lay not in the old models of service but in a newer place.”
Swift is at his most interesting when he focuses on business details. He tells us, for example, that adjusted to today’s values a ticket to the Theatre would be seventeen pounds—far less than the average ticket price for a current West End production, let alone the grotesquely inflated amounts Broadway theatergoers are expected to shell out. The new business model seemed to work—better, perhaps, than it does now. The advent of a second theater, the Curtain, in 1577 marked the beginning of what Swift tentatively deems an entertainment district. In 1586 the entrepreneur Philip Henslowe began constructing another playhouse on Bankside, south of the river; it was closely modeled on the Theatre and was named the Rose. New playhouses continued to open throughout the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign and that of James I (other notable examples being the Swan [1595–6], the Globe [1599] and the Hope [1613]), until the Puritan Long Parliament shut down all the theaters in 1642.
When Shakespeare was on his way up, there were no business models for playwrights; authors had to develop their own arrangements, the more creatively the better. You couldn’t really make a living writing plays yet. Writers were still dependent on rich patrons, and during the frequent occasions when the playhouses were closed due to plague, hungry writers, like Shakespeare, turned to poetry (this is why we have Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece), introduced by fulsome dedications to potential patrons. Shakespeare, of course, made some money as an actor, even though he seems not to have been very distinguished in that profession. The solution that finally lifted him to prosperity was a novel one. He became a profit-sharer in a single company, the Chamberlain’s Men, run by Burbage, whose son Richard was the star of the endeavor: the first Hamlet, the first Richard III, the first Othello. Shakespeare received a share of the company’s total profits, and for the rest of his career he wrote plays only for the Chamberlain’s Men, which became the King’s Men on the ascension of James I in 1603. This novel business model was initiated by Shakespeare but followed by later playwrights.
In 1596 James Burbage purchased part of the Blackfriars Dominican priory and began construction on what would become the Blackfriars Theatre. The following year he died, and his son Cuthbert, Richard’s elder brother, took over the family business. The original Theatre closed and was demolished in 1598.
Swift’s narrative shows the rapid commercialization of theatrical performance that took place during this brief and extraordinarily creative period. The elaborate guild system and the widespread practice of long apprenticeships had ruled English craft and commerce for centuries; now, as Swift demonstrates, they began rapidly to break down. But attitudes and practical methods remained. “When late Elizabethan Londoners thought about art,” Swift reflects, “they did so in a vocabulary borrowed from the livery companies. This might seem alien in our modern, post-Romantic world, which seeks to separate the category of the aesthetic from labour, from craft and trade.”
Swift’s assumption of a natural division between art, craft, and trade seems dubious, especially when he discusses “a key analogy of the age: the idea that the realm of art might properly belong within the world of work, and might therefore both be taught and be regulated by official institutions.” This somewhat naïve formula serves to underscore the gap between the critic and the working artist of any place or time. When has the realm of art not belonged within the world of work, at least if the artist aims to earn a living from his work, which even the most “Romantic” artists have generally had to do? The theater, in particular, is inevitably inscribed within the bounds of commerce, since stage works are developed not in the privacy of a study or a studio but through corporate effort and via painstaking trial and error. Audience response during the rehearsal process has everything to do with the choices that are made in finalizing the script. Recently some theatrical friends of mine were surprised by a would-be playwright who refused to make necessary changes, arrogantly demanding, “Do you think that Arthur Miller or Shakespeare would have made changes on request?” The answer is Yes, of course they would have. They were men of the theater, and in the theater that’s how the sausage is made.
Stephen Greenblatt makes a bold claim in his Dark Renaissance: “In the course of his restless, doomed, brief life, in his spirit and his stupendous achievements, Marlowe awakened the genius of the English Renaissance.” Greenblatt spends the rest of his book backing up this claim, and very persuasively, too.
English life in the later sixteenth century was of a bleakness and violence that is hard to credit now. Middle-aged people had lived through a whiplash-inducing series of political and religious about-faces, from Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic church and dissolution of the monasteries, to his son Edward’s stricter Protestant regime, to “Bloody” Mary’s return of the country to the Catholic fold, to the nine-day reign and then the execution of Lady Jane Grey, to Elizabeth’s accession and attempts to establish a sustainable middle ground. Each change of regime, it goes without saying, was accompanied by “dark waves of conspiracies, suspicions, arrests, and executions, all on top of the ordinary punishments meted out in a brutally punitive society” and brought about “unbearable stress and danger” in the population. Culturally England was a backwater, on the very fringe of European society. The universities were hidebound. The most popular entertainments in London were animal fights.
And then, in the years after 1580, it all changed: “a constellation of brilliant poets, the greatest dramatists in the English language, extraordinary advances in navigation, astronomy, and mathematics, the first attempts to establish English colonies in the New World, and in intellectual life, the speculative and experimental daring that led Francis Bacon to declare that ‘knowledge itself is power.’”
So what had Christopher Marlowe to do with this radical shift? Everything, it seems. An alienated intellectual (of which his Dr. Faustus was to be the most famous prototype), he had undergone a rigorous traditional education—King’s School, Canterbury, on a scholarship, BA and MA from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge—and come out on the other side a committed skeptic rather than the religious conformist the education was designed to turn out. In 1587 his first play, Tamburlaine the Great, begun while he was still at Cambridge, was performed by the Admiral’s Men and made a remarkable impression. “Virtually everything in the Elizabethan theater is pre- and post-Tamburlaine,” Greenblatt tells us. The play’s radical directness, its extreme brutality, its disorienting lack of conformity with any accepted moral codes showed writers an artistic freedom of which they could now avail themselves—if they dared. Tamburlaine, who called himself the “Scourge of God” (though as Greenblatt points out, it’s not clear what god he has in mind), murdered thousands and suffered no reprisals. In the play he even enjoys a happy ending, more worthy of comedy than of a highly wrought drama of vengeance and destruction. Moreover, he is sexy.
I myself was fortunate enough to see Albert Finney play the role at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-1970s, a never-to-be-forgotten experience. If the play had such a galvanizing effect on a teenager from a distant and vastly more morally relativistic future, one can only imagine its impact on audiences of the period, accustomed as they were to religious spectacle and the moralistic Christian fare provided by the late medieval plays. “Nothing in Marlowe’s play,” Greenblatt reminds us, “remotely conforms to the moral lessons taught in schools or preached from the pulpits of Elizabethan churches.”
And then there is the play’s blank verse—the unrhymed iambic pentameter that would immediately become the most popular medium for dramatic literature. Daniel Swift treats its advent as a corporate effort, but Greenblatt squarely credits it to Marlowe and describes its impact. “This brilliant technical innovation almost instantly displaced the reigning fourteeners and poulter’s measure and became the dominant verse form on stage. . . . For the audience in the late 1580s, the blank verse of Tamburlaine had precisely the effect of suddenness that we have already identified as one of Marlowe’s most striking characteristics.”
In the brief career that ended with his violent death at the age of twenty-nine, Marlowe continued to break new ground at an astounding pace. The Jew of Malta (1589–90) furnished a vehicle, Greenblatt opines, for smuggling into the cultural mainstream the ideas of Machiavelli, whose works had effectively been banned in Elizabethan England. “Machevill,” as contemporary spelling had it, was almost a demonic figure in that time and place, a bogeyman; but as Greenblatt writes, “bringing Machevill on stage as the prologue was not altogether a send-up. Buried deep in Marlowe’s play is an understanding of the human condition that was given its most eloquent and memorable expression in The Prince’s notorious aphorisms.” As he had done with the character of Tamburlaine, Marlowe, with his Jew, put words into the mouth of an exotic, non-Christian figure that could not have been spoken by a character closer to home.
Greenblatt credits Marlowe’s entry into the dangerously skeptical, freethinking circle around Sir Walter Raleigh with much of the inspiration for Doctor Faustus (1594). There are surely autobiographical elements in Marlowe’s portrayal of Faustus, “a tragic hero unprecedented not merely in his own writing but in all of English drama”: like Marlowe, Faustus was a “class outsider”; like Marlowe, he had taken an MA course designed to prepare young men for the Protestant ministry but had been blown off course by the radical implications of his studies toward the perilous shoals of religious skepticism and moral relativism. Not only Raleigh himself, but members of his inner circle like Thomas Harriot and Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland (who, like Faustus, longed to know everything), can be seen reflected in Marlowe’s drama. One of the play’s most innovative features, hugely influential on all future drama (and film), was Marlowe’s invention of the soliloquy. “Today we are so familiar with the dramatic representation of a powerful, complex inner life, largely through the intimacy of the soliloquy, that we somehow assume that it was always an available artistic resource. But in Doctor Faustus it emerged on stage for the first time. . . . It was from Doctor Faustus that the author of Hamlet and Macbeth learned how it could be done.” It amounted, Greenblatt claims, to the “invention of inwardness”—a revolutionary innovation indeed.
Not only did Marlowe invent dramatic inwardness, Greenblatt says, he “created the English history play.” Marlowe had collaborated with Shakespeare on the three parts of Henry VI—he is now officially listed as co-author of the plays—and shortly afterward he decided to do something new and different with Edward II, a rather dangerous subject, for Edward was a known homosexual, and Marlowe shared this trait. While the Henry VI plays contain vivid characters, there is no central, focal figure; with Edward, Marlowe provided a full-blown psychological protagonist. Again, the way was paved for Shakespeare, who in his mature history plays—think Richard II, Richard III, the Henry IV plays and Henry V—followed the path that Marlowe had started down.
Not a great deal is known about Marlowe’s brief life, but what we do know is intriguing and has provided rich fodder for speculation, a temptation to which Greenblatt has not proved immune. Academic success lifted Marlowe above his very modest origins and brought him to Cambridge. There is evidence to suggest that he served for some time as a government spy, but what he might have done on these missions is unknown. He was definitely involved in counterfeiting activities, possibly as part of his undercover work. And his tragic and apparently pointless early death, stabbed in the eye during a contretemps over the bill at a Deptford lodging house, has kept historians both amateur and professional guessing for centuries. Greenblatt counts himself among the many who believe there must have been more significant motives to the killing than appeared in the official record. “The case remains open,” he says, “and it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone, at this distance of more than four hundred years, will crack it to everyone’s satisfaction. Notwithstanding Marlowe’s hot temper, a simple argument over the bill seems improbable.”
The biographical facts, and the many conjectures as well, have been written up elsewhere and are not the most interesting parts of Dark Renaissance. All too often Greenblatt resorts to the usual litany employed by specialists in this period; in the course of just one page, for example, we get “. . . evidently . . . might have . . . might have . . . could also have . . . unlikely to have . . . might have . . . may have . . . unlikely to have . . . ” Worse, Greenblatt sometimes gives in to the most dangerous temptation a literary biographer can indulge: that of hazarding conclusions about an author’s life from what goes on in his fictions. Regarding Doctor Faustus, for instance, he posits that “[t]o judge from the character [Marlowe] created, he found himself confronting anxiety, regrets, a sense of waste, fear, the hectic turning from one goal to another, and a lingering awareness of having done something disastrously wrong.” But can we judge from a character an author has created? Surely that is a bad biographical policy.
The great value of Dark Renaissance lies not in biography but in Greenblatt’s judgment, very well backed up, that Marlowe’s role in the opening up of English culture to the wider one of the European Renaissance was major, decisive even, and also to his insistence that the debt owed to Marlowe by Shakespeare, the man who reaped what Marlowe had sown, was inestimable.
Through the fissures Marlowe had made, light began to flow. He had made it possible to write in a new way about violence, ambition, greed, and desire. He offered poetic liberation: thanks to his astonishing style, the expressive power of the English language took a great leap forward. Shakespeare did not choose to write in the same way—Marlowe was too reckless, too hyperbolic, too relentlessly destructive. But Shakespeare saw that he could now enter territory into which no one before Marlowe had dared to venture.
Shakespeare was the recipient of Marlowe’s gifts of reckless courage and genius, but he did not want to be Marlowe.
What might Marlowe have done had he lived to Shakespeare’s eventual age, fifty-two? In what ways might the two men’s works and worldviews have diverged, and would the theater have developed in different directions than it eventually did? But after having castigated our authors for fruitless speculation, I will take a lesson and refrain from indulging in it myself.
[1] DARK RENAISSANCE: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, by Stephen Greenblatt. W. W. Norton & Company. $31.99.
[2] THE DREAM FACTORY: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare, by Daniel Swift. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $30.00.