A History of English Literature

Shakespeare to semi-divine status was taken seriously in Germany and even in

France. In 1818 Keats entitled a poem ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’.

The Bard was even more read than he was performed.

Luck and fame

Shakespeare joined the theatre as it entered its great period, at a time of general

intellectual ferment, cultural confidence and linguistic exuberance. Materials were to

hand – romances, chronicles, classical and European literature – and models of

English verse in Sidney and Spenser, and of lively drama in Lyly, Kyd and Marlowe.

Shakespeare has been lucky in that his English remains largely intelligible.

Chaucer’s ‘verray parfit gentil knyght’ can be misunderstood:verray meant true,

parfit complete, and gentil noble. Compared with Chaucer, Shakespeare takes more

risks with words, but their senses have changed less since his day. He also lived at the

beginning of the modern age: his ideas of the world were shaped by the Christian

and humanist ideals which have fed most of what has so far followed. Lucky in his

school and home, he then had to make his way in the world. At the age of 20 he was

himself a father of three. The theatre offered him a living.

The drama

It was three centuries since drama had moved out of the church and into the street,

although the Mystery plays, which dramatized biblical stories in all-day cycles on

summer holy days, continued into Shakespeare’s time. The Reformation had trans-

ferred much pageant and spectacle to the State. The Church was cowed, and the

theatre was the chief place where the concerns of the day could, with care, be venti-

lated.Drama was popular: it explored the interests of a large new audience.

Theatres were erected by commercial joint-venture companies outside the City,

increasingly on the South Bank of the Thames, the home of diversions not permit-

te d in the City.

The commercial theatre

Strolling players did not make money: audiences melted away as the hat went round.

In London inn-yards of the 1550s, the spectator put his penny in a box at the

entrance (hence ‘box-office’). Then in 1576 James Burbage, a carpenter-actor-

impresario, built The Theatre for the Earl of Leicester’s players, who had a Royal

Patent. This was the first purpose-built permanent public theatre. Although its title

(and perhaps its shape) recalled classical theatre, Burbage would have been surprised

to learn that what passed on the stages he built is today valued more than the non-

dramatic poetry of his day.

In 1599 the new Globe theatre stood three storeys high, near Southwark

Cathedral, surrounded by other theatres, houses, inns, churches, shops, brothels,

cockpits and bearpits. Puritans feared the theatre; the Court watched it, protecting it

from puritan disapproval by licensing it. Built by Shakespeare’s company out of the

old timbers of The Theatre, the Globe could hold 3000 – a huge audience, although

the modern Globe (built 1997) is surprisingly intimate. There were then five other

big theatres in a London of about 200,000 people. Ten days counted as a long run,

and revivals were unusual; new plays were always needed.

The plays were put on at 2 p.m. in this enclosed yard with its roofed stage and

thatched galleries. Shakespeare mentions ‘the two hours’ traffic of the stage’: there

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