Why Do We Know Our Shakespeare?

 by Mark Richardson

Imagine a conversation with a friend (or a complete stranger, for that matter) in which you casually refer to Shakespeare. How would you react if they replied, with genuine puzzlement, “Who?” You’d surely be taken by surprise. After all, it’s Shakespeare. You probably wouldn’t expect said friend/stranger to know a great deal about Shakespeare, but for someone to have no idea at all as to what the name meant, well that would be a surprise!

The Globe Theatre (modern recreation)

So why is it that we know about Shakespeare? Simple: his plays. You or your friend/stranger could probably name several plays. His plays have been performed for generations before us, his name has been heard often, even when we aren’t properly listening, and it feels for many that a knowledge of Shakespeare is somehow part of British (even world) culture. 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. Poets such as Sir Walter Raleigh (better 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 as notable as theirs. Not that his poetry is average. 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, how likely would his name be as familiar (or unfamiliar) to you as those names on that list above? The plays are the thing.

But so what? All of this is obvious, surely? How could it be otherwise? Well, consider this: what if those plays, for which he is world famous, had never been written? 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. We are as confident as we need to be that he wrote his plays. The point here is not that someone else might have written the plays, but that for Shakespeare to be able to write the plays in the first place, he found himself at exactly the right time to do so. What does that mean? Well, in order to write plays, Shakespeare, through no action of his own, found himself at exactly the right time in history for such an activity to be hugely successful. It wasn’t anything to do with religion, or philosophy, or having the ability (and what an ability!) to write plays. Nor was it to do with being momentarily in fashion, picked up by wealthy patrons or by influential critics because his work was deemed to be worthy of interest. No, this was the right time in history because of a novel invention, the consequence of which was that someone like Shakespeare was essential to the success of this invention. So, what was the invention? Purpose-built theatres.

Let’s start from a basic fact: plays can only exist if playwrights write them in the first place. But plays also need playhouses in which to perform them. Shakespeare could have written a play without any expectation of a theatre company performing, 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 theatres is that they were new. Until the last quarter of the sixteenth century, plays were performed in market squares, on church steps, on religious fest days or in private halls or castles. Purpose-built theatres only appeared in England for the very first time in history during Shakepeare’s 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 it is reasonable to assume that 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. After all, everyone would have been used to plays coming to them, rather than having to go to a theatre. 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 by Robert Greene 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 Lord Chamberlain's Men, a notable achievement 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 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. So, the new London 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. At the time, the average age of dramatists writing their first play was 27. 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 quickly attracted interest and first became the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and then, after the death of Elizabeth, the King's Men. These were powerful sponsors, showing how important the plays had become. Although acting company were threatened with potential disaster in 1599 - an extension to their lease to their theatre was refused, so they had to move - this only resulted in the company ‘simply’ 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? What if the timelines didn’t overlap so neatly? What if Shakespeare 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 contend, it is not possible that he would ever have been a playwright at all. There would, in effect, have never been the Shakespeare that we all know.

If we see his actual life as a playwright being created in that ferment of his mid twenties, but he had been born in, say, 1554, rather than 1564, then his best years of play-writing 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. There would not have been so much demand for plays: the first two theatres were not particularly successful yet. So, by the time he arrives in London, in possibly 1580, there would have been very little opportunity to achieve the success he did in ‘our’ world. 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 too old to be writing plays. 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 backwater 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 alternative future, 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 familiar landscape of literature would have been changed utterly. There is a 2019 film called Yesterday that explores what the world might look like if the Beatles were 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. Hardly a propaganda tool in comparison with, say, Henry V. Without that, all may not have ended well in such an alternative world.

But all is well that ends well. Back in the real world, everything is as we left it. The plays exist, their place within British and world culture secure. 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 help keep me in a job for 35 years!