Most works described in the playlist display a reticence with language; either they employ heightened colloquial language contemporary to the writing of the play or a fairly flat stolid tone. Some pepper the work with quotations. I wanted quotes to be ubiquitous and to seamlessly blend with the language.
I sought to employ real phrases from sources, and quotations from plays without these additions seeming self conscious or contrived. Initial first drafts were written in a kind of ad hoc verse that my editors found too impenetrable to understand.
I realised that if I wanted to write in a way that was convincing I would have to:
1. read Shakespeare’s sources and begin to feel the language and steep myself in Jacobean and Elizabethan writing;
2. do what many of Shakespeare’s colleagues and what Shakespeare himself did: steal, plagiarise and co-opt phrases passages and quotations from elsewhere.
Like an Elizabethan I kept my own 'commonplace book.' I stole widely from Shakespeare’s own writing, and other sources. I particularly enjoyed misquoting myself as Shakespeare, something I feel he would have done naturally.
To avoid merely taking in quotations but instead examining and feeling my way into religious and philosophical positions that influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries, I read Montaigne, Aristotle, Ovid, Epicurus, Horace and others whose positions and quotations enter the text in a variety of ways.
Speech and Characters
I wanted to avoid speech that was too modern and also to invent too many characters. There was enough material in existing clues and documentary evidence to extrapolate from.
A number of themes, like Shakepeare’s relations with Jonson are interesting, but the writings of Jonson and Shakespeare themselves, as well as the explicit commentaries Jonson made about Shakespeare’s writing, offered me plenty of information to work with without too much extra invention.
Much had to go. There was a story about Tarleton who as a water carrier carried people on his back, literally like Hamlet's Yoric.
The themes of Shakespeare's relations with three generations of theatre people (Tarlton, Kydd, Marlowe, Nash and Greene, Beaumont and Fletcher and others) fascinated me also and appear in earlier drafts; they are mentioned in the final draft but for reasons of narrative clarity were truncated or omitted.
Most of Ben Jonson's words come from his own writings and when Shakespeare speaks of his dead son as 'his most beautiful poem' this is taken directly from a poem written by Jonson about his own dead child and conflated with Constance's speech from the third act of King John (mid-1590s), which many suppose was inspired by his son Hamnet's death.
Rather than speak about Condell and Hemmings, I gave Shakespeare a best friend in Augustine Phillips, of whom we also know little. He was with Strange's Company and then the Admiral's and King's Men, and he was known to teach apprentices. He belonged to an earlier generation of actors than Shakespeare. He offered a chance to connect with the past and act as a mentor to Shakespeare.
He also stood in a way for all Shakepeare's fun-loving epicuran characters and his friends. Perhaps with a hint of the homo-erotic in their relationship. Thus gesturing towards one of the many contemporary constructions of Shakespeare's character.
Sonnets
I originally included a subplot about the sonnets, wherein after being chased by an editor who had collected his poems Will is convinced to arrange his sonnets into an order that hints at internal narratives to fool later readers. This amused me but was lost as it diverted from the action.
Examples of textual references embedded in the above section and indicative of the whole play:
Brave new world:
Reference to the tempest. 'O brave new world, that has such people in 't!'. In the play, the character Miranda has spent a majority of her life isolated from society, like the parochial young Will.
Augustine:
Augustine Phillips (died May 1605) was an Elizabethan actor who performed with Alleyn and Shakespeare. One of the first generation of English actors to achieve wealth and status through acting and his role as a company sharer. He is known to have apprenticed young actors and I make him Will's mentor, not such a far fetched notion given thier ages and experience.
Flower of Cities:
Reference to a poem written by a visiting Scottish ambassador, William Dunbar, describing London in 1501 (beginning of the Tudor era)...
Scummy Channels:
...but the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe described it as a 'seeded garden of sin, the sea that sucks in all the scummy channels of the realm' in 1593, causing him a short time in Newgate prison.
WILLIAM:
A Brave new world of
Nobles, Clowns, and Harlots
From School I’d classics, history, disputation
Father taught me to draw beauty from raw stuff,
Turn a penny from a craft
From Mother I’d old tales, women’s wisdom
Now Augustine taught me to act, to forge truth from deception and in the theatre, this country boy learned how to: steal the dreams of kings
And to sell them back with interest
….
See me then:
YOUNG WILL:
I sweep, oyster shells, blood, and piss
From the theatre floor,
I mend plays, act and…
I advise gentlemen on the cleanest of the whores
That gull the building
WILLIAM:
Anne asks:
ANNE:
“What of your London life?
The song has London as the
Flower of all cities? “
YOUNG WILLIAM:
Oh my love,
It is a life… Unimagined in the country!
London is a sea sucking in all scummy channels of the realm…
Everyone is 20, drunken, fighting for my purse!
Glad I am that Augustine is my guide.
(Passes him a cape)
-1616
How to Think like Shakespeare
I was interested in accumulating sources from which to replicate in some small way some of Shakespeare's creative process so I looked at the following sources:
- Giovanni Boccaccio, source for All’s Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
- Raphael Holinshed, Shakespeare’s primary source for his historical plays.
- Plutarch, source for Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Timon of Athens.
- The Geneva Bible (1557-1560), the pre-King James Version
Much of Ben Jonson’s speech and some of Marlowe's is taken from elements of their writings either in spirit or directly.
The scene between Greene and Shakespeare gives Greene speeches that are a few lines of Falstaff combined with a large portion of text directly lifted from Greene's Groatsworth of wit wherein he criticises Shakespeare. Most of the dialogue spoken by Greene is from his own writing apart from the bawdy poem he recites at the beginning which is written by Nashe. The entire section of Greene’s death is influenced by the excellent research in a paper by Hanspeter Born, 'Why Greene was Angry at Shakespeare' in
Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, vol 25 (2012), pp. 133-173. This account paints Shakespeare as a fairly unsympathetic character who refuses to support Greene in his hour of need. The parallels made in the text between Shakespeare as Shylock and Hal and Greene as Falstaff emerged naturally.
I discussed this process with Professor Scott Newstok who later in 2016 wrote an article, that was expanded recently into a book (How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education by Scott Newstock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)). As this process of writing developed the style evolved from a kind of 'cod' Shakespearean with attempts at iambic pentameter into a brittle form of contemporary verse that utilised simplified period speech.
This lent familiarity, poetic sensibility and a sparse modern accessibility to the language which evolved and which can be clearly seen when one compares the verse of the earlier drafts to the most recent.
WILLIAM:
Kit was our darling, I hear now the laughter of London’s young playwrights…
Nashe: melancholy drunk, in stained black Satin, Peele: pox ill and fawning
And you were there
Robert Greene: proud, degraded, bitter…
Laying a hand on a serving girl’s knee:
GREENE:
Softly my fingers up this curtain heave,
And make me happy stealing by degrees.
First bare her legs, then creep up to her knees!
A touch and sigh a mannerly thigh
A pox on leaving when I am nigh
Ow!
WILLIAM
She spits ‘pon him, Greene vomits ‘pon my Stratford made boot and all laugh!
These: the university-educated elite,
Though all broke…‘cept Marlowe, who was betimes sent to Italy a secret spy
As an actor I was paid nightly,
Not just once for the play, as writers.
I’d business in Stratford; I had money
But with no University was not a gentleman
I was disentitled to the name of poet,
And why else Greene?
GREENE:
For, if a real poet has forty Pound in his purse together,
He neither buys land nor merchandise with it,
But a month’s commodity of sack, wenches and capons!”
WILLIAM:
But, good doctor…such a prescription leads the purse to a low ebbe?
GREENE:
I have nothing it is true Shakebags!
But ’tis actors have stolen my money!
I sold “Orlando Furioso”
To the Queens Players for twenty nobles,
They sold it to the Admirals Men for as much more!
A host of privateering, ball sucking cod fleas!
WILLIAM:
This is the business Greene, without players
There would be no playing….
GREENE:
There is no faith to be held with the puppets that speak from our mouths!
You actors get by scholars your whole living!
WILLIAM:
I am half a writer Greene!
GREENE:
Yes, Shakespeare!
You are… half a writer indeed
….
WILLIAM:
But scribbling players would draw up the future:
Theatre’s closed for plague, But all swam well with me, I gave loans at interest.
While you sank penniless, calling to my rooms to:
(To Greene)
“Lend you money?”… You offer no surety Greene,
But some old works already sold to other companies.
The theatres are closed,
I cannot help.
GREENE:
So I must feel the storm and starve,
While you are fed with cakes?
There are not three good men left un-hanged in London
And one is lost to this cold September night
WILLIAM:
You died, a whore wept over you
In that filthy room, midst the stink of Pickle herrings and vinegared wine
Your last pamphlet called me “waspish ant and upstart crow”… I won the publisher’s apology I was Shylock:
“Yesterday you call’d me dog, And for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys?”
Or like Hal…
Breaking through foul and ugly mists That would strangle me.
I let him die,
Find who I am
I write with sweet compassion
Is this Will a changeling?
Plays and reputation make melody of us,
But we are raw cacophony:
A din of tempers dear and vicious
….
20 years have past; kit Marlowe? Stabbed,
Your reckless tongue; tied by secret authority.
Kyd, tortured, Many imprisoned.
Ben, even you carry the brand for Tyburn
BEN
A reminder Will,
The Poets leash is tight,
His neck slight
-1616
