1599 - “O for a Muse of
fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention…”
For Shakespeare 1599 was one of his
greatest years. It is the year that he and the other shareholders of the
Chamberlain’s Men built The Globe Theatre, the year he wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar and As You Like
It. It is also the year that Shakespeare started and probably completed one
of his greatest and perhaps his most complex play Hamlet. It is also the year that a collection of twenty poems
appeared attributed to William Shakespeare and published by William Jaggard.
Modern commentators and academics tend
to agree that only five of the twenty poems are written by Shakespeare. But
let’s start with the beginning of 1599.
Shakespeare worked for the Chamberlain’s
Men (later known as the King’s Men). He also become a shareholder in the
company in 1594. The Chamberlain’s Men had been performing in the actor/manager
James Burbage’s purpose built Shoreditch venue The Theatre since 1587 when it
was built. The Theatre was a multi-sided structure with a central open yard and
three tiers of covered seating was built. This gave The Theatre an amphitheater appearance. One side of the polygon extended out
to form what was a thrust stage. The Theatre probably cost about £700 construct
(a huge sum at the time). Standing room was a penny, covered standing two
pennies and three pennies for a covered seating. The Theatre venue was a timber
building with a tiled roof and probably held about 1500 to 2000 people.
In 1596, a dispute arose of the
renewal of the leasing of the land The Theatre stood on. When James Burbage
died in 1598, the issue became more complex. Believing that they owned The
Theatre (especially the building materials), James Burbage’s sons Cuthbert and
Richard offered some of the members of the company (including Shakespeare) shares
in the building.
So on the rainy morning of December
28th 1598, carpenter
Peter Street along with the half a dozen laborers and the shareholders of the
Lord Chamberlain’s men including Richard Burbage, Cuthbert Burbage, John
Heminges, William Shakespeare, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope and William
Kempe, began dismantling The Theatre to take the timber to a riverside
warehouse Street had by the River Thames in Bridewell. This was in preparation
for using the timber for a new theatre with a new design. This theatre was to
be built on a new site at Maiden Lane Southwark when the weather was a bit
drier. Early in spring of 1599 The Theatre’s beams were raised again to build
the new theatre which could accommodate an audience of 2000 people. This
theatre was to be called the Globe Theatre.
The Globe Theatre was a large open
air theatre which would have appeared from the air as doughnut shaped or a
polygon of 20 sides. The three-tiered seating area was covered and the stage had
a front apron performance area and later a thrust stage was also added. It probably had an audience capacity of up to
3000.
Over January and February of 1599
as work was progressing on The Globe, William Shakespeare was writing Henry V. He also had to deal with the
illegal publication of a collection of poems under his name published by William
Jaggard. It is now agreed that only about five of the poems were written by
William Shakespeare. The collection included some poems from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. However, most of
Shakespeare’s time would have been spent in early in 1599 on Henry V.
Shakespeare had had great success
with the trilogy of ‘Richard II’, ‘Henry IV Part 1’ and ‘Henry IV Part 2’ and
now it was time to deliver on the finale of these history plays with the most
anticipated and most well-known of these histories, ‘The Chronicle History of
Henry the Fifth’.
William Shakespeare had probably
written speeches for the Henry V and
scribbled plot ideas for a couple of years now, but with his 15 % ownership in
the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and bills to pay on the new Globe Theatre and back
in Stratford, he and the company needed a success. Elizabethan audiences had
met the wild, undisciplined Prince Hal but now it was time for them to meet
King Henry V as he embarked on a quest to reunite all of England on his
conquests and trials on the battlefields of France.
“O for a Muse of fire, that would
ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to
act
And monarchs to behold the swelling
scene!”
It is a stirring moment in theatre
to hear The Chorus’ first words in the Prologue of ‘Henry V’. “O for a Muse
of fire…” Unlike a Greek Chorus, The Chorus in this play is more like the
medieval chorus of a single actor. The scene is set and The Chorus fires our “imaginary
forces” asking us to see “within this wooden O” and imagine two
mighty monarchs, thousands of soldiers, great battles, and the sound of
thousands of “proud hoofs”. The stage is set for the actors and the
audience to embark on a great journey through history and their own
imaginations. The excitement of hearing these words is made more so when you
consider they were perhaps the first words uttered on the stage at The Globe
Theatre in late April 1599 when this famous theatre first opened.
You can imagine that day in April,
when the red flag to indicate that a history play was going to be played was
raised early in the morning. Around midday, crowds would start to arrive and by
1pm Henry V would have started. Just
after 4pm, the crowds would leave the theatre having witnessed the premiere of
one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.
As rehearsals were underway for the
opening of The Globe Theatre and Henry V,
Shakespeare would have started on another of his greatest plays, ‘The Tragedy of Julius Caesar’.
“Why, man, he doth bestride the
narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep
about
To find ourselves dishonourable
graves.”
There are many reasons why
Shakespeare’s ‘The Tragedy of Julius Caesar’ is a great play. It is a very
innovative play which does not shy away from plot complications but conversely
embraces the cheap thrills of deaths, blood, gore and omens. It was written and
performed probably in May of 1599 and was probably performed in the newly built
Globe Theatre. It is a wonderful mix of tragedy and historical drama. The death
of Julius Caesar occurs early in the play and it builds towards the Act Five
climax where Cassius dies when he orders his own servant to kill him. On a
macro level, the play centres around the attempt of Cassius and others to keep
the Republic of Rome from becoming an Empire. The play is set in 44BC and has
two protagonists (Brutus and Cassius) and two antagonists (Anthony and
Octavius). Although the play shifts its perspective many times, the most
sustained perspective on the events that unfold is that of Brutus who
eventually kills himself with his own sword.
I like to think that as the summer
was drawing to a close in 1599, Shakespeare thought it was time for a good
pastoral comedy. In June or July of 1599, Shakespeare took up his quill to
write a rustic love story which starts in a duchy somewhere in France and moves
to the mystical Forest of Ardenne (aka Arden). Perhaps writing ‘Julius Caesar’
had made Shakespeare question the machinations of power and city life and he
yearned for the simple pleasure of country life. When the white flag indicating
the performance of one of Shakespeare’s great comedies As You Like It was raised over The Globe, people were in for a
treat. This comedy play starts with a feud between brothers. Orlando, whose
father Sir Rowland de Bois has recently died, describes to Adam (an old family
servant), how since his father’s death his brother, Oliver, who inherited his
father’s estate, has deprived him of education and a decent allowance. This is
against his father’s expressed wishes. Moreover, Oliver allows Orlando’s older
brother to be educated widely and
broadly. Orlando wants to confront his brother with his grievances.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act One – “Neither a borrower nor a lender
be;
For loan oft loses both itself and
friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry…”
By mid-year in 1599, everything
seemed to be coming together for Shakespeare professionally. He had just moved
with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to the Globe Theatre, he had had a great
success with the play ‘Julius Caesar’ and he finally had an actors worthy of
playing great parts since the actor Richard Burbage seemed to be growing in
skill and reputation. But still Shakespeare was restless or as Shakespeare’s
Hamlet puts it, “Something is
(was) rotten in the state of Denmark.” On
about August 9th, 1596, William Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet had
died and sometime in August 1599, Shakespeare had returned to Stratford Upon
Avon for a memorial service. He wrestled with the ‘ghost’ of his son and
notions of mortality and death in ‘King John’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Julius
Caesar’ and even had entered a period of writing comedies like ‘A Midsummer
Night’s Dream’ and ‘Much Ado About Nothing' to forget his loss, but still the
big questions of life and death seemed to plague him. On top of this, with
Queen Elizabeth I entering her 66th year without a direct heir and
questions of who would succeed her always on people's thoughts (and sometimes
their tongues), questions of death, life and stability abounded in the minds
and hearts of most English men and women, including Shakespeare.
It is not, therefore, unthinkable
that as the summer weather started to turn in August 1599 and the rain and
ghostly mist worked its way back into Shakespeare’s daily life, that
Shakespeare turned his mind to reworking Saxo Grammaticus’ ‘Amleth’ (probably as influenced by
Beleforest’s 16th century
retelling of the story).
It may be useful to ask why
‘Hamlet’ has become such a famous play for Shakespeare. It is his longest play,
though probably the full five-hour version we have today is a conglomerate of a
number of versions and a number of approximately four-hour stage versions of
the play that would have been performed in Shakespeare’s time. This means that
he wrestled with this play even after writing it and it is probably the only
one of his plays that seems to have been re-written and had speeches added to
many times. What I think is so riveting about the play is its dramatic
structure, its complex characterization, its rich verse and dialogue and the
masterly way it deals with complex issues of life, death, love, revenge and
fate.
The play starts on a dark, misty
winter’s night on the walls of Elsinore Castle in Denmark in about 1200.
Bernardo relieves Francisco from his watch on the wall and the darkness and the
mist make it difficult for them to identify one another. Francisco leaves and
Bernardo is soon joined by Marcellus and Horatio (a good friend of the Prince
of Denmark, Hamlet). We soon discover the reason for why Horatio is on the wall
this dark night. It seems that Bernardo and Marcellus wanted Horatio to witness
something strange that they have encountered on previous watches.
Hamlet is a unique
play. It has a complex and intriguing flawed main character. When Richard Burbage,
who Shakespeare wrote the part for first played the part, even he must have
struggled with learning the part of Hamlet in what is Shakespeare’s longest
play. The play went on to win acclaim for Richard Burbage and for Shakespeare
and it was probably the fourth most popular Shakespeare play in his lifetime
(after Henry IV Part 1, Richard III and Pericles).
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