The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare. Anna Beer

      It was a volatile world, involving extensive touring away from the capital, not always without trouble. The Queen’s Men were in Dublin one month, invited to perform at the wedding of King James VI and Anne of Denmark in Edinburgh the next, with the more everyday mayor’s plays filling in the gaps.¹³ The death of a star performer in one company, the death of a patron of another, could change everything, as it did in 1588, the year in which Richard Tarlton (of the Queen’s Men) died and in which Lord Strange formed a new company from the remnants of the Earl of Leicester’s Men. Already disrupted when the earl had taken some of his playing troupe with him to war in the Low Countries, the company completely dissolved on Leicester’s death.

The new players moved swiftly “into the highest league,” not least because of the presence of Will Kemp, a comedian who was, almost, Tarlton’s equal (Dutton 2018, p. 61). Trouble came and was averted. The Lord Mayor, attempting to close the playhouses, instructed the two main London troupes (the Admiral’s and Strange’s Men) to stop playing. The former “dutifully obeyed, but the others in very contemptuous manner departing … went to the Cross Keys [an inn] and played that afternoon” (Chambers 1923, Volume 4, p. 305). Some of Strange’s players were imprisoned for their contempt, but most were protected by their patron.

      Strange’s Men prospered, being awarded six slots in the Revels Calendar of 1591–1592, and three the next year. And between 19 February and 22 June 1592 they performed the first fully recorded London season, playing continuously at the Rose. Prior to this, no company had attempted to set up more-or-less permanent residence in London. The new permanent theaters were changing drama. In this first season of 105 days, no fewer than 27 plays were staged.

      This was very different from touring, when companies would take three or four plays out on the road, with perhaps two or three new plays in their repertoire because they could rely on a new audience in the next town or great house. In London, there was a pressing need to get the playgoers back for more. The new public theaters needed more plays, more playwrights: a perfect recipe for the young actor, and aspiring playwright, William Shakespeare. He was not alone, of course: “As the commercial theatre expanded, many young men, primed with a command of rhetoric thanks to their training in the new grammar schools, made their way to the capital. Under-employed and highly literate, they were soon called upon to produce copy for the players, who (with large venues and longer periods of residence) were turning over material at an unprecedented rate” (Van Es 2013, p. 1). It was an era of unprecedented opportunity for an actor-playwright. The new playhouses (when they were permitted to open) needed new material, far more than had been required when companies only went on the road: “itinerant acting companies could succeed by repeating in different places a small inventory of plays” (Bednarz 2018, p. 22). Those “with an established urban-based clientele were, instead, compelled to acquire larger and more differentiated repertoires – including diverse and innovative comedies – in order to satisfy the expectations of inveterate theatre-goers who could choose among competing venues” (Bednarz 2018, p. 22).

In retrospect, we can see that William Shakespeare was in the right place, at the right time: London 1592. Whether his family, particularly his father, saw the situation in the same way is another question. Fred Tromly (2010, p. 251) speculates on John Shakespeare’s response to his son’s career choice, bearing in mind that no one knew just how lucrative the theater industry would be for his son. Believing that John saw William “rejecting the traditional forms of business in favour of an enterprise that, in addition to being morally questionable in the eyes of many, offered very little promise of stability and steady income,” he sees an unbridgeable generation gap opening between father and son. For Jonathan Bate that rejection of artisan business in Stratford was less calculated but no less significant. Refusing to speculate about the Shakespeare family’s Catholicism, Bate nevertheless asserts that “the balance of probability is that William Shakespeare’s own instinct and inheritance were cautious, traditional, respectable, suspicious of change. We may as well say conservative” (2008, p. 66). This all changed when William “got the acting bug.” For Bate, as with Tromly, John Shakespeare would not have been best pleased. Coming from a class where “idleness” was sin, he “would have subscribed to the common view that actors were little better than vagabonds […] When John heard that his son had become employed in the theatre, he would have been flabbergasted. The dramatic profession was a completely unknown quantity” (2008, pp. 73–74).

      What no one could have imagined was William Shakespeare’s unlikely and swift rise from actor to jointsharer in a new acting company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. But that is where he was headed.