Shakespeare's Lost Years in London by Arthur Acheson (audio ebook reader .txt) 📕

construe it--_It is otherwise now_;
for my very share in playing apparel will not be sold for two hundred
pounds.' 'Truly,' said Roberto, 'it is strange that you should so
prosper in that vain practice, for that it seems to me your voice is
nothing gracious.' 'Nay, then,' said the player, 'I mislike your
judgement; why, I am as famous for _Delphrygus_ and _The King of
Fairies_ as ever was any of my time; _The Twelve Labours of Hercules_
have I thundered on the stage, and played three scenes of the Devil
in _The Highway to Heaven_.' 'Have ye so?' said Roberto; 'then I pray
you pardon me.' 'Nay, more,' quoth the player, 'I can serve to make a
pretty speech, for I was a country author, passing at a moral; for it
was I that penned _The Moral of Man's Wit_, _The Dialogue of Dives_,
and for seven years' space was absolute interpreter of the puppets.
But now my almanac is out of date:

'"The people make no estimation
Of morals, teaching education----"

Was this not pretty for a rhyme extempore? If ye will ye shall have
more.' 'Nay, it is enough,' said Roberto; 'but how mean ye to use
me?' 'Why, sir, in making plays,' said the other, 'for which you
shall be well paid, if you will take the pains.' Roberto, perceiving
no remedy, thought it best to respect his present necessity, (and,)
to try his wit, went with him willingly; who lodged him at the town's
end in a house of retail ... there by conversing with bad company, he
grew _a malo in pegus_, falling from one vice to another.... But
Roberto, now famoused for an arch-playmaking poet, his purse, like
the sea, sometime swelled, anon, like the same sea, fell to a low
ebb; yet seldom he wanted, his labours were so well esteemed. Marry
this rule he kept, whatever he fingered beforehand, was the certain
means to unbind a bargain; and being asked why he so slightly dealt
with them that did him good, 'It becomes me,' saith he, 'to be
contrary to the world. For commonly when vulgar men receive earnest,
they do perform. When I am paid anything aforehand, I break my
promise.'"

The player described here is the same person indicated by Nashe three years before in his _Menaphon_ "Address." Both are represented as being famous for their performance of _Delphrygus_ and _The King of the Fairies_, but the events narrated connecting Greene with Alleyn, and the opulent condition of the latter, refer to a more recent stage of Greene's and Alleyn's affairs than Nashe's reference. Both Nashe's and Greene's descriptions point to a company of players that between 1589-91 had won a leading place in London theatrical affairs; that performed at the Theatre; that played _Hamlet_, _The Taming of a Shrew_, _Edward III._, and _Fair Em_: the leader of which personally owned theatrical properties valued at two hundred pounds, and who was regarded by them as an actor of unusual ability. Seven years before 1592 this company performed mostly in the provinces, carrying their "fardels on their backs." It is very apparent then that it is Alleyn's old and new companies, the Worcester-Admiral-Strange development, to which the allusions refer.

While the "idiot art-masters" indicated by Nashe and Greene as those who chose, purchased, and reconstructed the plays used by Strange's company, included others beside Shakespeare in their satirical intention, this phase of their attacks upon the Theatre and its leading figures became centred upon Shakespeare as his importance in the conduct of its business increased, and his dramatic ability developed.

It is now generally agreed by critics that Shakespeare cannot have left Stratford for London before 1585, and probably not before 1586-87, and the likelihood has been shown that he then entered the service of James Burbage as a hired servant, or servitor, for a term of years. When Henslowe, in 1598, bound Richard Alleyn as a hired servant, he did so for a period of two years, which, we may judge, was then the customary term of such service. Assuming that Shakespeare bound himself to Burbage in 1586-87, his term of service would have expired in 1588-89. Though we possess no evidence that Shakespeare had produced any original plays at this time, the strictures of Nashe and Greene make it apparent that he had by then attained to the position of what might be called dramatic critic for the Burbage interests. In this capacity he helped to choose the plays purchased by his employers for the use of the companies in which they were interested.

Greene had come at odds with theatrical managers several years before Shakespeare could have attained to the position of reader for the Burbages. Even some of Greene's earlier reflections, however, seem to be directed against the management of the Shoreditch Theatre. In attacking theatrical managers he writes in, what he calls, "mystical speeches," and transfigures the persons he attacks under fictitious characters and names. In his _Planetomachia_, published in 1585, he caricatures one actor-manager under the name of Valdracko, who is an actor in _Venus' Tragedy_, one of the tales of the book. Valdracko is described as an old and experienced actor, "stricken in age, melancholick, ruling after the crabbed forwardness of his doting will, impartial, for he loved none but himself, politic because experienced, familiar with none except for his profit, skillful in dissembling, trusting no one, silent, covetous, counting all things honest that were profitable." This characterisation cannot possibly have referred to Shakespeare in the year 1585. When it is noticed, however, that nearly all of Greene's later attacks are directed against the Theatre and its fellows, it is probable that the stubborn, wilful, and aged James Burbage is also here scurrilously indicated. In writing of London and the actors in his "dark speeches," Greene refers to London as Rome and to the Shoreditch Theatre as the "theatre in Rome." In his _Penelope's Web_ he writes: "They which smiled at the theatre in Rome might as soon scoff at the rudeness of the scene as give a plaudite at the perfection of the acting." While it is Burbage's Theatre that is here referred to, it is evident that his quarrel was not now with the actors--whom both he and Nashe praise in their quality--but with the plays, their authors, and the theatrical managers who patronised them.

It is evident that Shakespeare had something to do with the acceptance by the Burbages of plays by Marlowe and Kyd, and that Greene believed his own lack of patronage by the companies playing at the Theatre was due to Shakespeare's adverse influence. Knowing Shakespeare to be _the son of a Stratford butcher, educated at a grammar school and recently a bonded servitor to Burbage_, this "Master of Arts in Cambridge" questions the literary and dramatic judgment of the grammar school youth, and late serving-man, and employs his fellow university scholar, Thomas Nashe, to ridicule him and his critical pretensions.

Nashe returned to England in 1589, after a two years' absence upon the Continent, and cannot have acquired at first hand the knowledge he shows of dramatic affairs in London during the preceding year. It is evident that this knowledge was gained from Greene for that purpose. Mr. Fleay has demonstrated that Nashe, in his preface to Greene's _Menaphon_, alludes satirically to Thomas Kyd as the author of _The Taming of a Shrew_, and of the old _Hamlet_. Both of these plays were owned by Lord Strange's (now the Lord Chamberlain's) company in 1594, when, as I have suggested, they had recently taken them over from Pembroke's company, which was undoubtedly a Burbage company--using some of the Burbage properties and plays while under Shakespeare's management in 1591-94. Being Burbage properties, these plays were acted by Lord Strange's company between 1589 and 1591. Besides satirically indicating these plays and their author, Nashe goes on to criticise the "idiot art-masters" who make choice of such plays for the actors. "This affectation of actors and audience," writes Nashe--meaning this suiting of plays to the crude taste of the actors and the cruder taste of the public--"is all traceable to their idiot art-masters that intrude themselves as the alchemists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse, indeed it may be the ingrafted overflow of some killcow conceit, etc. Among this kind of men that repose eternity in the mouth of a player I can but engross some _deep read school men or grammarians, who have no more learning in their skull than will serve to take up a commodity, nor art in their brains than was nourished in a serving man's idleness_, will take upon them to be ironical censurers of all when God and poetry doth know they are the simplest of all."

This attack of Nashe's upon Shakespeare was recognised by all of the scholastic clique, and certain of its phrases are re-echoed in later attacks upon him by other scholars for several years afterwards; in fact, Nashe's diatribe proved to be a cue for Shakespeare's future detractors. In the expression "killcow," Nashe alludes to Shakespeare's father's trade. A few years later--1594--Chapman refers to Shakespeare as "judgements butcher," and later still, in 1598, Florio in his dedication of the _Worlde of Wordes_, and, in 1600, Ben Jonson in _Every Man out of his Humour_, also refer satirically to the supposed fact that Shakespeare's father was a butcher. In 1593 Chapman, in attacking Shakespeare in the early _Histriomastix_, re-echoes the term "idiot art-master." The phrase "ingrafted overflow of a killcow conceit" refers to Shakespeare's additions to, or revisions of, plays owned by his company that were originally written by such scholars as Greene. "Deep read school men or grammarians" is a reference to Shakespeare's grammar school education. "No more learning than will serve to take up a commodity" refers to Shakespeare's business management of Burbage's affairs, and "a serving man's idleness" to his recently ended term of service with Burbage in that capacity.

It shall be shown that in later years when Chapman, Roydon, Florio, Marston, and Jonson attacked Shakespeare in published or acted plays that he invariably answers them in kind. We have only inferential evidence that he answered Greene's and Nashe's reflections at this time by writing a ballad against them. Ralph Sidley, in verses prefixed to Greene's _Never Too Late_, published in the following year (1590), defends Greene from the attack of a ballad or jig maker, whom he calls a clown.

"The more it works, the quicker is the wit;
The more it writes, the better to be 'steemed.
By labour ought men's wills and wits be deem'd,
Though dreaming dunces do inveigh against it.
But write thou on, though Momus sit and frown;
A Carter's jig is fittest for a clown.