by Mark Richardson
There may be many reasons offered as to why we know about Shakespeare: we might know something about his life, we might enjoy his poems, particularly his sonnets, we might know about him because we have been forced to read him at school or watch his plays in the theatre, we might have acted in one of his plays in that same theatre. The reality, of course, is that there is only one reason we know him as we do: his plays. Ask anyone to name a play by Shakespeare and you expect to be given at least one play. Certainly, you would not expect the answer to be “Who?” Indeed, most people would be able to reply with more than one title. In fact, why would you even ask? We just assume, with some justification, that people know his plays. It is inconceivable that they would not. The plays are, to coin a phrase, the thing.
He wrote poetry too, of course, but he was not alone in that. There were many poets living and working in England in Shakespeare’s day, some hugely popular at the time, others more so later. Poets such as Sir Walter Raleigh (best known for inventing chivalry, the potato and tobacco, apparently), Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sydney, John Donne and Edmund Spenser produced countless great poems. Shakespeare’s poetry is no more, or less, notable than theirs. His poems are very fine: his sonnets in particular have inspired countless writers and readers since they first appeared in 1609, many of which were written much earlier. They deal with so much of a range of experiences, covering life, love and death, that they are, in effect, a life-time’s work.
But, without the plays having been written, his name would likely be as familiar (or unfamiliar) to you as those names on that list above. Indeed, this article could never have been written. With no plays, the name would not mean much to most people, and so an article on him would have little relevance for any large audience. I might be able to write a brief piece on his poems, but I certainly could not expect many people to be familiar with them. Venus and Adonis? The Rape of Lucrece? The Phoenix and the Turtle? These are not household names, to be sure.
But it is not my contention that Shakespeare is known for his plays. As claims go, it would not be a remarkable one. So, what of it? Well, what if there might have been a chance that he never wrote those plays? What then? What if, for a simple reason beyond his control, Shakespeare, with all his talent intact, found it impossible to write those plays?
Don’t get the wrong idea, though. This is not a rehash of those tedious conspiracy theories that argue that Shakespeare never wrote his plays. I am as confident as I need to be that he wrote his plays. What matters here is that the existence of plays depends on one factor above all: theatres. Plays need playwrights to create them in the first place, but they also need playhouses in which to perform them. Writing a play without any expectation of a theatre company performing it would be possible, but it would not provide the basis of a career. But, of course, he did have theatres, notably and (now) famously, the Globe. So it is the existence of theatres that I want to highlight: without them, no plays, and without plays, no Shakespeare, or at least, as we
understand him) This is the point I want to consider: what would happen to his plays if he had been born slightly earlier or later than his actual date of 1564?
The striking thing about those theatres is that they were new. Purpose-built theatres appeared in England for the very first time during his life-time. The first was called the Theatre in 1576, with the second, the Curtain, the following year. Then there was a gap of ten years, before the building of the third, the Rose. The Globe was later built in 1599. Before 1576, then, plays were largely performed either in courts or palaces or, most commonly, out on the streets in squares or in coaching inns, with public performances usually taking place to celebrate religious occasions or as part of local fairs. In London, though, with so many people visiting it each day to buy or sell at markets, it seems that an entrepreneur calculated that there might be a market for the performance of plays. That a second was built so quickly after the first suggests that there was indeed a willing audience, but the fact that another one was not built for ten years suggests that the early days of theatre showed only a gradual increase of audience. Nevertheless, by the time that the Globe has been built, the impact of plays in London was considerable, as might be seen by the fact that one particular play, Thomas Nashe’s Isle of Dogs , was deemed so controversial that all theatres were closed for the summer of 1597.
Although it is notoriously difficult to be precise about dates when talking about Shakespeare, it seems likely that he arrived in London before 1590. By 1592, when he was 27, he had made enough of a name for himself that he was being criticised in print for being ‘an upstart crow’, ie a new-comer who was getting far too much attention. By the time he was 30 he probably had written 10 plays, and a year later saw the acting company of which he was part become the Queen’s Men, a title bestowed on the company by Elizabeth in no small part because of his plays. By 35 he had likely completed a total of 21 plays. This was in 1599, when his career became stellar: this saw the move to the Globe, which became, in effect, a new toy box that Shakespeare could play with in he any way he saw fit. From 1599 to 1613 (ie 14 years) another 21 plays appeared, many of them, such as Hamlet , Macbeth and King Lear , ranking amongst the finest in the world’s literature, not just English.
All well so far. But, there are two timelines here: those of the theatres, and that of Shakespeare. And, of course, they match. Indeed, they match very well indeed. When he arrives in London, there is a newly-established and vibrant theatre scene. The Rose has just been built, and there are thus three theatres, all of them requiring plays. In the old days, plays were recycled endlessly, but now the theatres were fixed, not travelling, so people wanted to see new plays, not old ones. The theatre managers needed plays, and lots of them. In comes Shakespeare. By now he is in his mid twenties, typically the classic period in a working life. Energetic, enthusiastic, skilled, Shakespeare must have been an absolute gift to any theatrical company: he could act, but he could also provide a rare talent of writing scenes, then whole plays, ones suited to the very players in their company. He could supply the theatre with material, and great material at that, and this in turn brought success: the acting company of which he was part became the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and then the Queen’s Men. Although their careers were threatened in 1599 (an extension to their lease to their theatre was refused, so they had to move), this only resulted in the company building a new theatre, the Globe, with Shakespeare at its literary heart. When he had had enough, probably by 1613, Shakespeare could retire back to Stratford, to die a wealthy man three years later. All’s well that ends well.
Well. Yes it did. But what about making a small change in the plot? Would it end so well if the start had been different? What if he had been born just ten years earlier? What would have happened to the timelines then? If he had been just a poet, then perhaps very little. He would still have been able to write those poems, they would have been published, and their quality would have been the same, which would have put him in good company with the other poets. But, I believe, it is highly unlikely that he would ever have been a playwright at all.
If we see his actual life as a playwright being created in that ferment of his mid twenties, then that would have taken place in a London when the first two theatres had just been built. Play-going was very much in its infancy, and the Rose still had ten years before it would appear. How much of a demand for plays would there have been at that time? Even if he had been lucky enough to get into the scene, it would see him as being 45 by the time the Globe was constructed. Even if he had the creative energy to write plays at that age, he would only have 7 years before he would die. How many of the greatest plays ever written could he have had a chance to write in that time? Would the theatre company have even been able to move to new premises? Would they have had the fame by then, based in part on over twenty Shakespeare plays? I would argue that it is unlikely. If born in 1554, he would have been just a little too old. He would have needed to get some sort of employment away from the stage, and he would have been competing with a number of writers who came from wealthy backgrounds, often from court and with university experience. A grammar school boy from a rural wasteland like Stratford may well have had little appeal.
What of another timeline, though? What if he was born just 5 years later, ie 1569? With the play-writing scene already in full swing, if he appeared in London in his mid twenties in this scenario, then he would have encountered a business that had already been going on very well without him. Other writers would have been established where he should have been. He would certainly have encountered a greater degree of competition, and would have found it harder to break into an already-established profession. That would have meant that he would have found it very hard to get beyond being an actor. No-one was needed to write the plays, because others were already doing what he could not have done, being too young and inexperienced. Without that springboard of play-writing already under his belt, the Globe would have been available, but perhaps not for him, too early as it was in his writing career. And even if he were writing, how many plays could he write that were, in effect, practice pieces for the final years of his career, where his genius truly and lastingly emerges? There might have been a Globe, but we may well not have ever heard of a Hamlet or a Macbeth or The Tempest . Without the run up of the earlier plays, he would be unlikely to stroll so seemingly effortlessly towards those great tragedies, and without those he surely would have found it creatively difficult to then have written his moving last plays, ones which explore magic and loss.
It is sobering to consider what the world might have looked like after either of the above mis-matches between timelines. If there were no plays, the landscape of literature would have been unrecognisable. There is a recent film called Yesterday that explores what the world might look like were the Beatles never to have existed. It is an amusing and light concept. A world without Shakespeare, though, is a far more serious affair. Apart from all the theatre companies that have relied on his plays for their living, and all the teachers who have been employed, among other things, to teach people about Shakespeare, there are bigger concerns in the background.
After the First World War, the British government felt that it had not been easy to inspire troops because no-one seemed to know what they had been fighting for. The solution? Create a new curriculum in schools that emphasised ‘Englishness’. And at the centre of that, you guessed, was to be Shakespeare. All schools should include a teaching of his plays, a practice that has continued across every single curriculum change since. The presence of Shakespeare is never truly challenged: for instance, every pupil sitting GCSE English Literature is required to have studied Shakespeare. No other writer has ever occupied such a position in British exams.
But the plays were not just used then by the government as a symbol of British identity. In 1944, during the Second World War, the British government sponsored a very lavish film version of Henry V, with the most famous English actor of his day, Laurence Olivier and filmed on a huge scale in colour (very rare then, especially in wartime Britain), with the absolute determination that this would then be heavily promoted in the UK and America in order to make the world aware of how important it was that America should continue to support the fight against Germany. The release followed hard on the heels of the D-Day invasion, and its propaganda value was clear for all to see. But, in a world without the plays, how would ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’ be presented as far as culture is concerned? Without Shakespeare, there would be no stirring speeches, no references to ‘This precious stone set in a silver sea’. Instead, all that would left might have been Keats on nature, or gloomy passages from Dickens. All may not have been well at all.
But all is, indeed, well. Back in the real world, everything is as we left it. But what all of this article is meant to celebrate is how lucky we all have been that Shakespeare and the new-fangled theatres managed to coincide so neatly in time, and how precious that coincidence has been for us all. And on a side note, how lucky for me as an English teacher: he has kept me in a job for 35 years!
He wrote poetry too, of course, but he was not alone in that. There were many poets living and working in England in Shakespeare’s day, some hugely popular at the time, others more so later. Poets such as Sir Walter Raleigh (best known for inventing chivalry, the potato and tobacco, apparently), Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sydney, John Donne and Edmund Spenser produced countless great poems. Shakespeare’s poetry is no more, or less, notable than theirs. His poems are very fine: his sonnets in particular have inspired countless writers and readers since they first appeared in 1609, many of which were written much earlier. They deal with so much of a range of experiences, covering life, love and death, that they are, in effect, a life-time’s work.
But, without the plays having been written, his name would likely be as familiar (or unfamiliar) to you as those names on that list above. Indeed, this article could never have been written. With no plays, the name would not mean much to most people, and so an article on him would have little relevance for any large audience. I might be able to write a brief piece on his poems, but I certainly could not expect many people to be familiar with them. Venus and Adonis? The Rape of Lucrece? The Phoenix and the Turtle? These are not household names, to be sure.
But it is not my contention that Shakespeare is known for his plays. As claims go, it would not be a remarkable one. So, what of it? Well, what if there might have been a chance that he never wrote those plays? What then? What if, for a simple reason beyond his control, Shakespeare, with all his talent intact, found it impossible to write those plays?
Don’t get the wrong idea, though. This is not a rehash of those tedious conspiracy theories that argue that Shakespeare never wrote his plays. I am as confident as I need to be that he wrote his plays. What matters here is that the existence of plays depends on one factor above all: theatres. Plays need playwrights to create them in the first place, but they also need playhouses in which to perform them. Writing a play without any expectation of a theatre company performing it would be possible, but it would not provide the basis of a career. But, of course, he did have theatres, notably and (now) famously, the Globe. So it is the existence of theatres that I want to highlight: without them, no plays, and without plays, no Shakespeare, or at least, as we
understand him) This is the point I want to consider: what would happen to his plays if he had been born slightly earlier or later than his actual date of 1564?
The striking thing about those theatres is that they were new. Purpose-built theatres appeared in England for the very first time during his life-time. The first was called the Theatre in 1576, with the second, the Curtain, the following year. Then there was a gap of ten years, before the building of the third, the Rose. The Globe was later built in 1599. Before 1576, then, plays were largely performed either in courts or palaces or, most commonly, out on the streets in squares or in coaching inns, with public performances usually taking place to celebrate religious occasions or as part of local fairs. In London, though, with so many people visiting it each day to buy or sell at markets, it seems that an entrepreneur calculated that there might be a market for the performance of plays. That a second was built so quickly after the first suggests that there was indeed a willing audience, but the fact that another one was not built for ten years suggests that the early days of theatre showed only a gradual increase of audience. Nevertheless, by the time that the Globe has been built, the impact of plays in London was considerable, as might be seen by the fact that one particular play, Thomas Nashe’s Isle of Dogs , was deemed so controversial that all theatres were closed for the summer of 1597.
Although it is notoriously difficult to be precise about dates when talking about Shakespeare, it seems likely that he arrived in London before 1590. By 1592, when he was 27, he had made enough of a name for himself that he was being criticised in print for being ‘an upstart crow’, ie a new-comer who was getting far too much attention. By the time he was 30 he probably had written 10 plays, and a year later saw the acting company of which he was part become the Queen’s Men, a title bestowed on the company by Elizabeth in no small part because of his plays. By 35 he had likely completed a total of 21 plays. This was in 1599, when his career became stellar: this saw the move to the Globe, which became, in effect, a new toy box that Shakespeare could play with in he any way he saw fit. From 1599 to 1613 (ie 14 years) another 21 plays appeared, many of them, such as Hamlet , Macbeth and King Lear , ranking amongst the finest in the world’s literature, not just English.
All well so far. But, there are two timelines here: those of the theatres, and that of Shakespeare. And, of course, they match. Indeed, they match very well indeed. When he arrives in London, there is a newly-established and vibrant theatre scene. The Rose has just been built, and there are thus three theatres, all of them requiring plays. In the old days, plays were recycled endlessly, but now the theatres were fixed, not travelling, so people wanted to see new plays, not old ones. The theatre managers needed plays, and lots of them. In comes Shakespeare. By now he is in his mid twenties, typically the classic period in a working life. Energetic, enthusiastic, skilled, Shakespeare must have been an absolute gift to any theatrical company: he could act, but he could also provide a rare talent of writing scenes, then whole plays, ones suited to the very players in their company. He could supply the theatre with material, and great material at that, and this in turn brought success: the acting company of which he was part became the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and then the Queen’s Men. Although their careers were threatened in 1599 (an extension to their lease to their theatre was refused, so they had to move), this only resulted in the company building a new theatre, the Globe, with Shakespeare at its literary heart. When he had had enough, probably by 1613, Shakespeare could retire back to Stratford, to die a wealthy man three years later. All’s well that ends well.
Well. Yes it did. But what about making a small change in the plot? Would it end so well if the start had been different? What if he had been born just ten years earlier? What would have happened to the timelines then? If he had been just a poet, then perhaps very little. He would still have been able to write those poems, they would have been published, and their quality would have been the same, which would have put him in good company with the other poets. But, I believe, it is highly unlikely that he would ever have been a playwright at all.
If we see his actual life as a playwright being created in that ferment of his mid twenties, then that would have taken place in a London when the first two theatres had just been built. Play-going was very much in its infancy, and the Rose still had ten years before it would appear. How much of a demand for plays would there have been at that time? Even if he had been lucky enough to get into the scene, it would see him as being 45 by the time the Globe was constructed. Even if he had the creative energy to write plays at that age, he would only have 7 years before he would die. How many of the greatest plays ever written could he have had a chance to write in that time? Would the theatre company have even been able to move to new premises? Would they have had the fame by then, based in part on over twenty Shakespeare plays? I would argue that it is unlikely. If born in 1554, he would have been just a little too old. He would have needed to get some sort of employment away from the stage, and he would have been competing with a number of writers who came from wealthy backgrounds, often from court and with university experience. A grammar school boy from a rural wasteland like Stratford may well have had little appeal.
What of another timeline, though? What if he was born just 5 years later, ie 1569? With the play-writing scene already in full swing, if he appeared in London in his mid twenties in this scenario, then he would have encountered a business that had already been going on very well without him. Other writers would have been established where he should have been. He would certainly have encountered a greater degree of competition, and would have found it harder to break into an already-established profession. That would have meant that he would have found it very hard to get beyond being an actor. No-one was needed to write the plays, because others were already doing what he could not have done, being too young and inexperienced. Without that springboard of play-writing already under his belt, the Globe would have been available, but perhaps not for him, too early as it was in his writing career. And even if he were writing, how many plays could he write that were, in effect, practice pieces for the final years of his career, where his genius truly and lastingly emerges? There might have been a Globe, but we may well not have ever heard of a Hamlet or a Macbeth or The Tempest . Without the run up of the earlier plays, he would be unlikely to stroll so seemingly effortlessly towards those great tragedies, and without those he surely would have found it creatively difficult to then have written his moving last plays, ones which explore magic and loss.
It is sobering to consider what the world might have looked like after either of the above mis-matches between timelines. If there were no plays, the landscape of literature would have been unrecognisable. There is a recent film called Yesterday that explores what the world might look like were the Beatles never to have existed. It is an amusing and light concept. A world without Shakespeare, though, is a far more serious affair. Apart from all the theatre companies that have relied on his plays for their living, and all the teachers who have been employed, among other things, to teach people about Shakespeare, there are bigger concerns in the background.
After the First World War, the British government felt that it had not been easy to inspire troops because no-one seemed to know what they had been fighting for. The solution? Create a new curriculum in schools that emphasised ‘Englishness’. And at the centre of that, you guessed, was to be Shakespeare. All schools should include a teaching of his plays, a practice that has continued across every single curriculum change since. The presence of Shakespeare is never truly challenged: for instance, every pupil sitting GCSE English Literature is required to have studied Shakespeare. No other writer has ever occupied such a position in British exams.
But the plays were not just used then by the government as a symbol of British identity. In 1944, during the Second World War, the British government sponsored a very lavish film version of Henry V, with the most famous English actor of his day, Laurence Olivier and filmed on a huge scale in colour (very rare then, especially in wartime Britain), with the absolute determination that this would then be heavily promoted in the UK and America in order to make the world aware of how important it was that America should continue to support the fight against Germany. The release followed hard on the heels of the D-Day invasion, and its propaganda value was clear for all to see. But, in a world without the plays, how would ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’ be presented as far as culture is concerned? Without Shakespeare, there would be no stirring speeches, no references to ‘This precious stone set in a silver sea’. Instead, all that would left might have been Keats on nature, or gloomy passages from Dickens. All may not have been well at all.
But all is, indeed, well. Back in the real world, everything is as we left it. But what all of this article is meant to celebrate is how lucky we all have been that Shakespeare and the new-fangled theatres managed to coincide so neatly in time, and how precious that coincidence has been for us all. And on a side note, how lucky for me as an English teacher: he has kept me in a job for 35 years!
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