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Not Just the Tudors
Shakespeare's First Playhouse
00:56:40
The making of Shakespeare: apprenticeship, theatre and the Burbage legacy
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like not just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash. Subscribe.
- [00:32]
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- [01:33]
Dan Jones
New season of this is History, prepare yourself for a tale of the ultimate frenemies. Two cousins locked in a bitter fight for power. From boyhood companions to deadly rivals, this is the story of King Richard II who becomes a magnificent but murderous tyrant. He, his nemesis, a dashing nobleman famous across the world. It's his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke. Will Henry be the man to stop him? The story continues. Join me Dan Jones on this is History, A dynasty to die for. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Before the globe, there was the theatre. Built in 1576 and secretly taken down timber by timber in 1598, it was the place of William Shakespeare's training. We know Shakespeare, of course, is the confident and assured genius, the mastermind behind Hamlet and King Lear and Othello. But this is the backstory. Shakespeare may have been married at an early age and so perhaps unable to become an apprentice proper. But my guest today suggests that apprenticeship is the deep metaphor behind Shakespeare's early career, and that by returning to these early years of Shakespeare's career and the building of London's first playhouse, we are returned to something of Shakespeare's worldview that is otherwise lost to us. In a nutshell, it is this. That art was craft, that in the 1580s and 90s money was at the heart of art, and that art might properly belong within the world of work. This might sound disenchanted, reductive, but as you'll learn, it roots Shakespeare in his age and offers a strikingly original way into understanding him. It is the story of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare. My guest today is Dr. Daniel Swift, Associate professor at Northeastern University in London, and his first book, Bomber county, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. He's also the author of the Bug, the Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound and Shakespeare's Common Prayers. He writes like a dream. And appropriately, his latest book is the Dream, London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and you're listening to not just the Tudors from History Hit. Daniel, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:19]
Dr. Daniel Swift
Thank you very much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
- [04:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm going to share a secret with the listeners, which is that about a decade ago, when Daniel and I were colleagues, I used to sneak into his lectures on Shakespeare because they were wonderful and I learned so much and I still filled with all the revelations from those extraordinary lectures and that quality of thought is present here. So I'm completely delighted to talk to you today.
- [04:48]
Dr. Daniel Swift
Well, you are very kind. It was a thrill for me to have you there. I was very aware you were in the room, so it was a huge honour for me, as opposed to my usual scruffy students.
- [04:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You are a literary scholar, but you're also a historian. As it is very clear from this work and in this book, you rely on two sets of archives which might at first seem unusual ones for a Shakespeare scholar. What are they and why are they so valuable?
- [05:20]
Dr. Daniel Swift
The archives I took most from and in many ways was most moved by were two apparently quite kind of dry and technical sounding sets of documents. The first is a set of really of kind of legal records which describe a series of cases which were waged and counter waged and objected to and resumed and dropped. And then various people die and their heirs then take up the cases, all of which surround the ownership of the playhouse that you mentioned called the theatre. Now, those legal suits, and the most interesting bits for me are actually the depositions, when we catch people talking in their own voices, were discovered a long time ago in 1913 by a great antiquarian scholar called William Wallace and were transcribed then. So many of those have been known to Shakespeare's biographers and to historians of the playhouses of 16th century England. But what people tend to have done is to look through these confusing, tangled records for any direct mention of Shakespeare or anything that's directly relevant to something within the plays themselves. That's always considered the kind of gold nugget is if you can find a mom in a legal document and draw a direct line between that and a moment in the place you say, for example, here's a horrible legal case. And then Shylock in Merchant of Venice is someone who is kind of trawled through the legal system and maybe we can find a kind of link there. Now, my sense is that what that misses is it misses all of the world around Shakespeare, and it misses all of the other things that were going on in the lives of the people who he was working alongside. So by only looking too narrowly at his kind of personal reactions and responses and experiences, we miss the great other kind of whirl of life that's around him. And that's what I love most about social history, which is the sense of capturing people's lives. But it's also the great insight of all novelists, which is that the story really lies in character. And what the really interesting thing is people, often quite ordinary people, going about their daily lives in kind of interesting and unusual ways. So that's the first set of records I looked at. And the second set of records I looked at again, looks from the surface to be quite dry and quite technical, which are the records kept by London's livery companies, which were the great companies which regulated work in Elizabethan London. And they were incredibly important, influential institutions. So they regulated apprenticeships and the wages that people were paid, and they tested the quality of work produced by craftsmen in Elizabeth in London. Now, those livery companies still exist today in a much reduced form. I mean, I don't mean reduced in a condescending way. They're largely charities. We still have the Fishmongers Company, for example. In Shakespeare's time in Elizabethan London, they were much, much more powerful Important political bodies. And they were crucial to the kind of civic and political life of London in this time. And the account books are kept in kind of minute detail. So we get the stages of people's careers, which became really interesting to me just how long it was that young men spent as apprentices, for example. Again, anyone who's a historian of 16th, 17th century England loosely knows about the system of apprenticeships, that young people would bind themselves to a master for a lengthy period of time and learn a particular trade or craft. I became more and more interested in how demanding that system was. So we were talking about a seven and a half year average for an apprenticeship. This is a time in which the average lifespan in London is 32 or something. So it's a vast section of your life. And the reason why people bound themselves these apprenticeships was because it offered enormous rewards. It offered a stable, well paid, secure working life. And it offered participation in the kind of civic, political life of the city. You could vote for the Lord mayor. And I became more and more interested in the details of that. So the details of people's working lives, much of which is colorful, enjoyable, fun, the amazing feasts that they had within delivery companies, and some of which is good kind of novelistic detail about when people fall out and bring suits against one another, all of that is interesting. But the real thing for me, and the thing that perhaps has been overlooked, is the normality and convention of this entire system, quite how common it was for young men of Shakespeare's social class, Shakespeare's generation, Shakespeare's age, to go through an apprenticeship system. You mentioned already that he was married at a young age, therefore couldn't be an apprentice. And again, biographers have tended to read that, read his youthful marriage in quite sort of romantic or colourful ways. Was he seduced? Did she seduce him? Did he seduce her? Does this proof that he was a great, passionate lover? Perhaps so. But to my more sceptical, disenchanted eyes, it also had a kind of interesting side effect, which is it meant how was he going to make money? And having three small children meant that he really did need to make money. So all of this kind of apparently quite dry detail, I think, at least I hope, brings us back to quite pressing kind of lively questions.
- [10:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It absolutely does. And actually, one thing I was really struck by in this sort of parallel world of the late 16th century and this system of apprenticeship and how it worked, is that men tend to be 24 at the end of an apprenticeship. And even today, the World Health Organization delineates that as the end of adolescence. So there's actually sort of more between our age and theirs than we might at first sight see, even though we don't have an average mortality age of 32. But let us talk about the theatre, which is the location, the heart of this story. It starts as a dream, the dream of one James Burbage. And to build it takes the equation of this entrepreneur and a carpenter and a money man. So tell me about them and the creation of this dream.
- [11:27]
Dr. Daniel Swift
Yeah, I mean, I use that term dream throughout the book because I want to give some life and liveliness to what would otherwise seem like a quite prosaic ambition, which is to make money. I don't think that's a prosaic ambition. And I also want to kind of return that question to the center of questions about art and about the creation of art and about the way in which someone might invent a career. James Burbage, his very early life is relatively unrecorded. We know he at least trained for a while as a joiner. He was from a family of carpenters. And carpentry and joinery are closely allied trades, obviously. And he becomes a sort of traveling player. He's the first of many characters who fall into this sort of dream of running away and joining the circus, which is also part of the sense of what I'm trying to write about is the kind of excitement of which I think is a perennial thing. And by about the mid-1570s, he's had something of a career as a traveling player. It's never been quite successful enough. He is an actor, but perhaps not an enormously distinguished one. And in that moment, and it's worth noting that other people are having this same idea, what begins to dawn on people, James Webish himself and others within London. But actually the same thing is happening more or less the same time in France and Italy and in Spain too, is that people realize that it's a really unlikely, unreliable way to make a living. If you are part of a travelling company of players, you might be sponsored by an aristocratic family, you might have some financial support from them. But to travel around the country performing your plays in converted inn yards, in grand halls and so on is never really going to make you an enormous amount of money or give you a kind of stable career. And what Burbage realizes is that a really simple kind of change in the setup of theatre might give enormous rewards, which is to build a purpose built playhouse that is a place where crowds go to in order to pay money, in order to Watch a play. And that sounds like a relatively minor shift, but it actually has enormous kind of consequences. I mean, I can give one simple example to that, which is that if you're a travelling player, your company of players can play the same play kind of every night, because you're changing location and you're changing audience. As soon as you have a settled playhouse and you have an audience you're relying on, you need to start changing the play fairly regularly. So you therefore need lots of playwrights. That's where Shakespeare begins to come into this picture. What is at the same time happening in London of the 1570s, 1560s, 1570s is a huge shift in the ownership of property. So London, because the population is growing, needs more houses. There's a boom in things like carpentry. And it's also, following the dissolution of the monasteries, a moment of kind of extreme sort of financial volatility. There's lots of money available, there's lots of land being opened up, being rented out to people. So James Burbage rents a piece of land in near what is now Old street roundabout in Shoreditch, which is outside the city walls. And that's crucial because it has a slightly different legal jurisdiction. But what Burbage doesn't have is enough capital to build this. So he brings in his brother in law, who is a successful, a prosperous grocer man called John Brain. And everything that I write about in the book begins with a kind of family story. But they're a deeply dysfunctional family, right? So not only do they quarrel, they also cheat each other. They lie to each other, they sue one another, perhaps like many families in many novels and sitcoms. And these two men go in as partners. They're never equal partners. Burbage is constantly cheating Brain out of almost everything that he can. But the two men stand behind this kind of project of building this playhouse. And what becomes clear very quickly is both that it's possible to make an enormous amount of money from this playhouse. London's growing population wants to be entertained. There are people willing to pay to go and see plays. And so on that level, the idea of building this playhouse is a brilliant idea. But what becomes equally clear at the same time is it's a terrible way to make money because the playhouse is constantly closed down. The city authorities dislike playhouses because they're places of idleness. Whenever there's an outbreak of the plague, which happens regularly, you know, we know about the famous great outbreaks, but there are regular smaller outbreaks, then the playhouses are closed down. They can't play during Lent. There are all sorts of times of the year they're not allowed to play. So what always happens with the theater, and I think is true perhaps of the entertainment industry more broadly, which is that there are periods of amazing profit making and then there are periods of debt and penury. And it's this movement between those two that seems to me to drive everyone in this story a little bit insane. Because they look at the playhouse and they think it could be making so much money, and it never quite does. And it's the mismatch between those two things that both animates people to keep on investing money, building Playhous, and at the same time kind of undermines and diminishes everything they can possibly do.
- [16:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
At one point, you try to calculate how much money can be made from playing in your book. Why is it so hard to calculate?
- [16:44]
Dr. Daniel Swift
It's a really good question. It may be because I'm terrible at maths. That may be the simple answer. Although I got a very brilliant friend of mine, friend of ours, in fact, who's a great kind of financial analyst, to have a look at the numbers, and he just said, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life. It's hard to calculate because again, I return to my kind of my loose and perhaps overworked metaphor of the dream, because there's an idea of what could be made. Let's say there are 700, 800 possible people who could fill the theatre at any one moment. The majority of them are paying a penny for standing. You pay slightly more to sit. There's a kind of tiered system of seats. The best version of the maths that I can do is you could possibly make five pounds from a single performance. If the playhouse is full, perhaps you could do six performances a week if things are going really well. That's a lot of money. A schoolmaster in Stratford, one of Shakespeare's schoolmates who he went to school with, many of them went on to be schoolmasters or vicars. They're making something like £25 a year. So possibly, if everything is going really well, a week's takings at the theatre is equivalent to a year's wages. So that's a lot of money. Now, it doesn't ever happen quite like that because the playhouse is closed down for all the reasons I mentioned, or because not enough people come to see the play. Right is another basic problem. Or there's an earthquake, as happens in London in 1580. All sorts of things can possibly go wrong to sort of undermine that. And anyway, that £5 doesn't all go to the owners of the playhouse. It has to also a share of it, quite a large share of it, has to go to the players themselves. So there's a second kind of business arrangement here which takes place, which is that Burbage and Bray, having built a playhouse, have endless problems finding players to fill the playhouse. So the next step to this, and this becomes crucial to Shakespeare, is the need for a kind of regular company of players who are attached to that playhouse itself, because then you're suddenly controlling much more of the business model. And it's worth saying that this is exactly the same model, although on a totally different scale, that the Hollywood Studios of the 1930s, also known as dream factories, famously invented. They bought everything in house. The craftsmen, the movie stars, the screenwriters were all bought in house, because then you can control the entire supply chain. And again, as soon as I start using terms like supply chain, I hope that all sorts of literary critics are hanging their heads in shame and despair. But it seems to me as a kind of useful question is thinking about the economics of this, the profit making of this, in order to focus us back on the question that I'm really interested in, which is young Shakespeare, three small children, married, barred from any proper trade. How on earth is he going to make a kind of a decent living? And how on earth is he going to secure a regular enough living that means that he can go on writing, which is what he does do, which is in many ways the most extraordinary thing Shakespeare does is have a long and successful career of writing.
- [19:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So what you do is you're rooting the construction of this first playhouse and the world of the players in London. And some of the ways you do this are. For example, you've mentioned the link between the theatre and the dissolution. There's also a link between players and preachers. Preachers object to playing, but at the same time, you argue they're not quite as antithetical and rivalrous as we might imagine. And then also you talk about the ragged end. This is a lovely phrase of an ancient way of arranging relations between men. I mean, this is an age of social change. Can you give me some sense of the social and religious tremors that are being felt throughout late 16th century London?
- [20:22]
Dr. Daniel Swift
I can, but I'm going to feel like a fraud in front of you, Susie, so I hate that you ask that question. So economic historians for a long time have kind of identified, I think, entirely convincingly and rightly, that 16th century London itself, not 16th century England, but London is a moment of extraordinary kind of economic change. And there are accounts, amazing accounts by people in the 1570s who clearly are feeling change as to be taking place. And they don't necessarily have the same words that we would use now to articulate what that change is. But one way of thinking about that change is the invention of capitalism. So that's, in some ways my story is also taking place at the beginning of that. And I would argue, and you may well disagree with me, that actually the dissolution of the monasteries is this extraordinary cataclysmic event that perhaps, certainly literary scholars have understood, estimated its enormous impact on not only the economic arrangements of the country, but the kind of daily life of people, the very fabric of daily life. So this is a moment of economic growth and economic change that's in part caused by the dissolution. It's in part caused by a shift in land ownership, a movement from a kind of feudal idea in which power lies in land, to an idea in which land might be a sort of property holding, might be a kind of financial position to take. And I became interested actually in what happens in many of the bits of land I was interested in around London is that they, the dissolution they're given by, and you will correct me also often to courtiers, but the courtiers pass them on quite quickly to a kind of rising class of people. Historians used to talk about the rise of the gentry, that that's happening in this moment, the emergence of kind of new, more business minded people. And what I try to do with all of this is actually locate these in individual people rather than vast historical trends. And there's a man named Giles Allen who is a kind of interesting figure in this story in that he actually owns the land upon which the theatre is built. And he also, like everyone in this story, has a kind of colorful background. He's a kind of sharp, business like figure. His own claim to the land isn't even that sort of secure or that honest. He repossesses a mortgage from somebody else. But what he does is he rents out the land that he owns to a range of different people. Most of his income comes from people renting tenements. Again, people are arriving in London because wages in London are better, so craftsmen are moving to London. Not unlike the young Shakespeare himself. There's a whole generation of young men who are moving to London and they need places to stay. Now, at the same time, another set of sort of tremors, if that's our chosen metaphor, are to do with relatively small numbers, but quite visible numbers of immigrants from Europe, from northern France and from the Netherlands, who are largely fleeing religious violence and who are also arriving in this moment. They bring with them new skills, particularly in weaving, which is the wool industry is crucial to the whole of the English economy at this moment. So there are various different groups moving in. And again, any story I'd like to tell about 16th century, and this is the proof that I'm not really a historian at all, actually has one eye on the present. And it seems to me that a lot of this story echoes, at least I hope it does, with the way we're perhaps thinking about technology changing work now, or about immigration, the changing shape of work itself seems to me a huge and interesting question that's occurring to us now and it's very much occurring to people in 16th century London. So all of that is taking place. But there's another thing that's taking place much more narrowly within the world of kind of entertainment, I suppose, which is the emergence or the development of something which we might think of as a kind of creative industry or kind of commercial industry around art itself and around theater. And that's being moved from the kind of world, the quite feudal looking world of aristocratic households and players, big parts of aristocratic households, to players becoming significant well off figures. There are endless complaints about how much money actors make in this time. Again, I'm not sure it's really true. I don't know. They make huge amounts of money or tiny numbers too. Like today Brad Pitt makes a lot of money, but most people don't. And so that there's a sense there, that there's a shift within that industry. But again, I can look at that in one person's career. Who's the person I really want to talk about? Who's Cuthbert Burvidge? So Cuthbert Burbage is the older son of James Burbage and he has a younger brother called Richard Burbage, who is a famous, famous celebrated actor. And Richard Burbage, the younger brother, played the first Romeo, the first Hamlet, the first Othello and so on. So he's a significant figure in Shakespeare's life and career. But Cuthbert is a more shady figure in all the senses of that word. Cuthbert is the kind of business manager really, and he takes over the running of the playhouse. He's absolutely instrumental in the invention, the creation of the globe. He is a slippery, to my mind, fascinating figure. Now, when Cuthbert Burbage is born, actors are qualified legally. Their legal status is more or less equivalent to vagabond. By the time Cuthbert Burbage dies, he lives a very long time. By the time he dies, not only is he an extremely wealthy man and he's made his money from playhouses, from the playhouse industry. He is also, this is my favorite detail. It's kind of novelistic detail. He is offered a knighthood late in his life, which he turns down. And he turns it down, I think, partly because it would come with a series of taxes that he doesn't want to pay. But it also for me seems to be a really useful sign of a shift in status. Right. Somebody whose origins lie in kind of vagabondage and who ultimately is in such a position not only to be offered that knighthood would actually to turn it down again, we might think there about kind of the shifting status of different parts of this society. That for me captures a kind of a sense of the enormous sort of economic, social, political, cultural shift that we're seeing in this time.
- [26:27]
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- [26:57]
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- [27:28]
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- [27:58]
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- [28:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Scholars talk about Shakespeare's lost years, the years in which we can't trace him. And you say we don't know, probably shall never know when he arrived in London. But we do know where he arrived. Can we talk about how Shoreditch made him? What was his first training? His apprenticeship?
- [29:05]
Dr. Daniel Swift
Yeah, absolutely. I should say that this phrase, the lost years, it makes me deeply uncomfortable in all sorts of ways because it seems to me, I mean, I argue in the book, of course, I'm going to say this, they're not all that lost. By the end of the period known as the lost years, which is sort of the mid-1580s, the early 1590s, we know quite a lot about him, so we can infer backwards quite a lot what he's done. The traditional endpoint to Shakespeare's lost years is usually taken as 1592, when he's named in a kind of sort of pamphlet that attacks him. But that seems to me to indicate that he's already has a sufficiently established career to be worth attacking by that point. So he has to have built it somewhere. My sense is that the idea of the lost years is a lovely kind of romantic idea, that maybe Shakespeare went off and did some kind of wild gap year, some kind of crazy thing. And there are all sorts of amazing theories about what Shakespeare might have done in this relatively undocumented period when he is in his early 20s, late teenage or early 20s. My sense is if we frame the question a slightly different way, we get a slightly different answer. And that's to do with, again, you mentioned it already, the kind of to do with place, really, rather than thinking particularly about him as an unusual individual, he clearly was unusual in some ways, in other ways was absolutely ordinary. That what is significant and what is important and what is lucky for payment for all of us is that the London that he arrives in at some point in the late 1580s is a place of, as I've mentioned, kind of turmoil and change and a growing industry of theatre itself. But more than that he falls in with this particular family, the Burbage's, who are by this point already well underway with running their playhouse. The theatre Now Shoreditch is significant and again as I said before, always kind of one eye on the present. Also shortage is significant in this moment for several different reasons. So that it's outside the city walls means a slightly more relaxed set of legal expectations, a slightly different jurisdiction and in particular the specific regulation of things like playhouses is very slightly more relaxed. There's an ongoing kind of turf war throughout this period about who has authority over what. Whether it's London's Common Council, whether it's the Lord Mayor, whether the Queen greater authority in certain places. And so there's a kind of running battle about who has the rights to regulate certain things. But one of the things that's significant to go back to what I was talking about before, is that what takes place in the areas outside London, the suburbs of London, is that the livery companies who regulate work have slightly less authority to regulate the work that's taking place. And they would insist that they in fact did have the right to regulate that work. But it seems that that's not entirely legally. So what that means by definition is that people are doing other sorts of work, slightly less regulated work in those areas just outside the city. The distances are tiny. Actually where the theater is now is 12 minute walk from the city walk, something like that, 15 minute walk straight up Bishopsgate really. But it's enough of a distance to permit a certain degree of kind of freedom or flexibility in what people are doing. And that means that you can build things like playhouses there. It means that you can run those playhouses in ways which are perhaps not be permitted within the city itself. And it also means that you have a kind of lively, vibrant neighbourhood really. Again, not only was Shakespeare, I argue, I mean there are kind of rumors throughout the history of Shakespeare biography where Shakespeare lived when he was first in London. John Aubrey, who is a perfectly well in sort of well informed, a mostly very reliable source, suggests that he lived in Shoreditch. But Shakespeare would at that moment also have been surrounded by immigrants, by the French and Dutch immigrants I mentioned already who had arrived in London and they didn't want to live inside the city in part because the city was very congested and in part because again there's slightly more flexibility outside the city walls. So it's interesting to Me that he would have arrived in a kind of in an immigrant neighborhood and immigrants from France, from Holland, but also immigrants from across England or from Wales. So a neighbourhood of change and new invention. And again, we might think about the kind of East End of London as a neighborhood which has both a long, long history of immigration, but also a long history of cultural creativity. So those two things are matched in that moment. And it seems to me significant to place Shakespeare in that as a kind of fertile place to be. Not because that therefore explains why Shakespeare becomes Shakespeare, but because it's gives us a slightly different sense of what's going on in theatre at this moment. It's a slightly less reliable art form. And the important thing is sort of commercial theatre is the thing that's considered a little bit dubious and something that belongs on the margins of the city. So all of that, I think, combines to give a kind of vibrancy to that neighbourhood itself. It's worth mentioning actually, that as soon as Shakespeare, I think, makes some money, he moves away from this neighbourhood and he moves actually to somewhere inside the city itself, which, again, I think is kind of moving. We have his early career in this kind of vibrant. Like a young person might move to Hackney Wick now, but then as soon as they make enough money, they move to Notting Hill. I don't even know. I'm so out of date. I don't even know where people would move to now. But they move somewhere that's a bit more reliable that their parents might think was a bit more respectable. Shakespeare does exactly that.
- [34:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And in the 1580s, as we've said, we don't know when he arrives, but what sort of thing might he have seen at the theatre?
- [34:37]
Dr. Daniel Swift
It's really tempting to say terrible plays. And I think that's partly true and I think that's partly untrue. The playing company who absolutely dominate 1580s theatre are called the Queen's Men. And they emerge from the smaller kind of aristocratic companies because they are the Queen's Men. They have royal patronage, but they also have the kind of best actors. And the kinds of plays that the Queen's Men like to perform are huge, dramatic battle sequences and large casts. And they are. I mean, I think we can sort of begin to imagine what they might look like now. The equivalent today might be a huge musical of some kind. Right? So something very dramatic, very large, very spectacular, very big in all possible ways. And Shakespeare certainly sees the Greensmen plays perform. Many of them are performed at the theatre itself as well as in other places. And we know that because a great deal of Shakespeare's slightly later plays do something curious but interesting, which is that they rewrite these queens men plays. So Shakespeare will very often take a big, slightly stodgy old play about the glorious victories of King Henry V, for example, and will rewrite it as his own Henry V. Or the Queensmen have a play about King Lear that Shakespeare then rewrites into his own King Lear. So Shakespeare's aware of those plays. So it's big nationalist, slightly propagandistic drama. But he also might have seen plays which have and continue to have a kind of moral edge to them. So slightly didactic theatre. There's a play which was popular and influential called the Three Ladies of London, which is a kind of moral drama. And there's a bigger story here, which is that English drama in many ways grows out of kind of church drama, moral drama, drama which was believed to teach a kind of moral, probably a good Christian level. Good Christian moral. Greed is bad. Charity is good. Now, that doesn't mean those have to be terrible plays, but it does often mean that to our modern eyes, they look quite flat precisely because Shakespeare comes along and sort of throws out the idea of morality. What interests me, actually, is that it takes a very long time for these old things, these big kind of warmongering plays and these moral dramas to completely disappear. There's a very brilliant earlier episode of your podcast about Dr. Faustus, which seems to me a really good example of a play which. It's a very radical and exciting play, but it still holds onto this old world of moral drama. Now, Marlowe, who wrote Faustus, is Shakespeare's immediate predecessor. They're about the same age, but Marlowe's career got going sooner. And in many ways, Marlowe is the person, much more than Shakespeare, who kind of reinvents English drama in this moment in the late 1580s. So when Shakespeare arrives in London, we have this backdrop of these kind of big nationalistic plays and moral drama that Marlowe himself is reinventing in all sorts of ways. And Shakespeare is the next step in that. But what I think is significant and important is how much we can catch Shakespeare learning from these things. And very often I write about this in the book. There's a curious thing, which is that because we now think Shakespeare is so wonderful and so extraordinary, we think he invented everything. And actually there's an amazing amount which he didn't invent, but she slightly repurposes and changes. And he does that because he is. And this is my, you know, great Obsession. He is a kind of craftsman in this moment. Right. You know, carpenters don't grow trees. Carpenters work on the wood itself. That's what the art is. And Shakespeare's art, at least in his early career, is taking on the materials that have been provided by others and turning those into extraordinary things. But that doesn't mean he has to originate the very raw materials themselves.
- [38:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And one thing that really emerges from your work is this sense that his apprenticeship involves learning from others. I mean, you say in your book that the timing and sequence of Shakespeare's plays is endlessly contested. But one thing that is now thought is that in his early plays, Shakespeare was collaborating and he was learning from others and he was watching and trying out their tricks. Tell me about this.
- [38:57]
Dr. Daniel Swift
Yeah, I think this is crucial. Again, there's a kind of romantic, slightly sentimental idea about Shakespeare on his own, in his garret, writing his plays brilliantly, uniquely alone. I don't think that idea is, is right for all sorts of different reasons. In part because that's not how screenwriters work now or writers on TV shows work now. And in part because, as you mentioned, a huge amount of kind of research over the past 25 years perhaps is kind of the great thing in Shakespeare studies has been to think about co authorship and about who he might have written alongside. What Shakespeare does, very pragmatically is he works with in his early career, more successful writers. And he does so because there's a pragmatic sense there that that therefore means that the play that you end up with will probably be good or popular, but also I think because he's learning from them. And what I would like to suggest is that that is not unlike the model of an apprentice who wants to be a carpenter, binding himself to a master carpenter to learn the trade of carpentry over a certain amount of time. It seems significant, interesting to me that Shakespeare, at least in those early plays, is only allowed to write the middle scenes. This is a really odd, recurring kind of motif in a lot of the scholarship. It's like he's not quite good enough to write the beginning or the end yet, but he's allowed to write the middle. He's kind of the stuffing bits that put things together. We can say whether we like the beginnings and endings of Shakespeare plays or not. But it seems that early on he's only trusted to write the middle sections because he is considered the kind of junior partner. And again, the irony of this is very often the people who were the senior partner are now forgotten to us. Right are not writers that we necessarily hugely celebrate. George Peel was a big writer of this moment, who Shakespeare co writes Titus Andronicus with. And people don't pay much attention to George Peel now. Apologies if there are any big George Peel fans out there. So there's a way in which there's a kind of practical process of learning going on here. I mentioned Marlowe already. He writes some early plays, co writes with Marlowe and perhaps a team of others. What Shakespeare will also often do is then come back later in his career and rewrite those early plays again. But it's significant to mention that of his early plays, the first five or so we can't know exactly, seem to have been co written. He doesn't start being a single author for a very long time. Now, to come back to the kind of financial question, there are very good financial reasons not to collaborate. And those reasons are put very simply, which is that if you're a playwright and you write a play, you sell it, at least in Shakespeare's early career, for a flat fee of about seven pounds. And if you co wrote the play, you divide the fee. So if you co write your play, you get three and a half pounds or less. So we need an explanation of some kind why it is that Shakespeare collaborates for so long. It's unusual that he does so. And I think the best answer I can give is that it's a process of learning, a process of apprenticeship that he is gaining what he can from this. I mentioned the word pragmatic before. I think it's important to see it as pragmatic because what Shakespeare's learning is techniques and fashions. And he then very often surpasses the people who were his masters. And he does so in a way which you can read as kind of affectionate, look back to how good the old masters were, or you can see as sort of cold and deliberate. What Shakespeare will do throughout his career, long after Marlowe has died, is he will drop kind of Marlovian sorts of words into plays like a kind of memory of Marlowe in some way. He'll keep on doing that throughout his career. So he never quite leaves this process of a relationship, an artistic relationship, behind, even after he has become this successful kind of assured playwright.
- [42:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And the other place that you locate an artistic relationship and a collaboration that is vitally important to Shakespeare is with the man you've already mentioned, Richard Burbage, the famous actor, the brother of the less famous Cuthbert. And this was so interesting to me. I mean, I've seen parallels in My own life in ways in which you can bring the best out in yourself and in others, in that kind of artistic collaboration. Tell me about this relationship between the two and what it meant for Shakespeare's work.
- [43:09]
Dr. Daniel Swift
Yeah, absolutely, and I'm glad you say that. That it seems like that is something that is familiar, because it seems to me, on some level, so obvious that any great artist might draw a great deal of kind of energy from others who are around them. And yet, at the same time, I think we still hold onto the idea of the kind of solitary genius that is still celebrated in so many different ways. Richard Burbage was clearly, from a very young age, an extraordinary actor, an extraordinary figure. There are descriptions of him from a little bit later, but from people who saw him act. And he had clearly a kind of remarkable. A remarkable gift. And the only evidence we really need of that is to sort of chart the roles that were written for him. So I mentioned this already. He was the first Romeo, the first Hamlet, the first Lear, the first Othello, the first Richard iii. I mentioned that. An early play, because in many ways that's almost the most demanding role of them all, the play by Shakespeare. It's really only Richard III speaking, right? It's kind of all about him. And that Shakespeare could do that is a sign, to me, anyway, that he had massive respect for and an enormous amount of faith in, but also kind of feedback from this actor. Now, what's important is that Shakespeare knew that Richard Burbish would be performing those roles, right? So part of this is about also an anticipation. And that's where we come back again to the sense of these relationships being not only friendly or affectionate relationships, but also people who are tied together across long periods of their careers. Shakespeare, very unusually, writes for the same small pool of actors throughout his whole career. Richard Burbidge is only the most famous of those. My favourite detail about this, which I mentioned in the book, which I think is great, which is that Richard Burbage has lots of children. Eight children. Not all of them survive childhood. And he gives all of them Shakespearean names except one. The only one who doesn't give the name of a Shakespearean character is the one who is born after he dies. So presumably he had no say over the naming of his final daughter. But just to give a sort of direct example of that, Richard Berbish, who was the first Romeo, calls his first daughter Julia or Juliet. The names are interchangeable. And she dies very sadly at a very young age. And then he gives the same name to another daughter a little bit later on. So there's clearly some kind of resonance there. There's some feeling there that Richard Burbage has a sort of strong sense of what this role meant. Now, I don't want to make a cheap joke about like, ooh, how creepy that Romeo called his daughter Juliet. That doesn't seem to be the point. The more interesting point seems to me that Richard Burbage believed that these names and these characters were his. He didn't really see them as Shakespeare's property, that he was only temporarily given for the extent of time he was acting on stage. That actually the way the two men work together, they might well have thought of these as joint properties. And actually that then seems to me to reveal something about Shakespeare's kind of workmanship and Shakespeare's possibility of his career and the kinds of conditions that he needed in order to be able to create those things. And again, we can choose any metaphor we want. If you want to be a carpenter, you need timber. I think there's a whole interesting story about timber actually, in that we could talk about two he raw materials. And it seems to me in this case that we have the two men working here together, perhaps even seeing the raw material in some way as each other. Burbage needed those words in order to become the actor. Shakespeare needed that actor in order to be able to create those plays, in order to be able to have them come to life. Foreign.
- [47:00]
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- [48:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
But you note there is a problem that being a playwright, a word rooted in craft, a term still not invented at this point in time, could not earn you a living. You've talked about how much money a play goes for, but you have a very compelling theory on what Shakespeare was doing instead at this time, or perhaps as well.
- [48:34]
Dr. Daniel Swift
Thank you. But yes, the numbers always sound peculiar because it's very, very difficult to translate Elizabethan prices to modern day prices of things. It would be lovely if there was a number, right? There was an equation that you could just type in and then you'd know what one thing was worth. And you can't do that because different things have. The differential values between things have changed over time. So it's very, very hard to work out exactly where it is. But again, let's take our figure of £25 annual salary, schoolmaster, a job pursued by Shakespeare's direct contemporaries and schoolmates as the kind of golden number that we're trying to get to. So if Shakespeare is making seven pounds per play, that sounds like, okay, great, no problem. You only have to write what, four plays a year? And you get. You're better than that. Now we might say, hang on a minute, that's a lot of work to write four plays a year. Some years Shakespeare does seem to write four plays again. Then we have the question about is he co writing some of those? He's not getting the full amount of that. Some years. 1591, weirdly, he doesn't seem to write any plays. So it's a bit inexplicable what he does for a living in that time. What people have long suggested is that one thing that Shakespeare would have had as another revenue stream is working as what was called a hired man. So working within the company itself. And that would be at the beginning, the early years of that would be very lowly sorts of tasks. There's a story recorded by really Shakespeare's first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, that Shakespeare might have held the horses at the kind of theatre door. There's no evidence of any kind for that, but it gives a sense of the kind of work that someone might do that's related to the theatre, but not actually very high level. He might then have moved on to helping with props, he might have played small roles, all sorts of things you could see that a hired man might do. That's possible. It's not secure as a form of income because hired men were only paid during periods when the playhouses were open, they were often closed. So we're still kind of circling a Question of, okay, how do we get to £25? We still need to get to that figure. One thing I try to argue in the book is that maybe we use a totally anachronistic modern term to see what Shakespeare is doing, which is that of a script doctor. In that I mentioned already, the Queen's Men plays for a cast of 40 actors reenacting some crazy battle sequence. And then the playhouses shut down because of an outbreak of plague, which is extremely common. There are terrible outbreaks of plague, but there are also kind of more routine ones. And so the players go on tour. Now, the players aren't likely to go on tour with a play that requires 40 actors and a vast amount of sets. So they need somebody to rewrite that play into something that can be a touring version of the play. So it's just that that's possibly one thing that Shakespeare might have done. It takes quite unusual skills, I think, to be a sort of script doctor to be able to do that. It's not simply cutting the big bits. You have to do all sorts of work to a play. And there's fascinating research, actually, on what happens to the Queen's Men plays over time. The text that we have seem to have been altered in certain ways. So perhaps that's one thing that Shakespeare is doing. The reason why I do think that is sort of convincing is that my sense is that one of Shakespeare's great talents, kind of magical talents, is to be able to bury down into the kind of core of a story and to create a whole story from something which is apparently fairly minor within that. And there are lots of examples of that. The way that Shakespeare works with sources, he seems to have this capacity which I suggest in the book is, I mean, workmanlike as the biggest compliment I can think of, but a way of thinking about structure and a way of thinking about specific scenes and specific details which can bring to life a whole story. It seems to me that's one of the great things that we celebrate in Shakespeare. And that capacity, that skill might also be one that's quite allied to script doctoring in a sense. It's worth saying that all of my story is about kind of early Shakespeare. And actually what Shakespeare does as soon as he does make some money is that he does what everyone does, which is he buys land because land is a hedge against times of uncertainty, because land is a profit making mechanism. So he does what pop stars do, the same thing you invest in property. So Shakespeare has this kind of pragmatic sense of securing an income And I think all of that is in service of giving himself security in order to write. I do believe that. I think, in the end, that's the instinct, I think, often of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own. And I understand that Virginia Woolf is not writing about men like Shakespeare particularly. But the argument that Woolf makes very persuasively is that creative writers need to have a kind of secure space, a kind of financial standing, a certain level of not quite respectability, but a sense of the importance of what they're doing. I think a vast amount of what Shakespeare is doing throughout his career is securing that room of his own, securing that freedom to write. That means he will not. If something terrible happens, like there's an outbreak of plague and the playhouse is closed down, he will not have to abandon writing and return to the trade of glovemaking, which is what his father did.
- [53:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
We've talked about how the theaters are so affected by the plague, and this is particularly true of the 1590s, which bring, you suggest, the end of a generation when it comes to playwriting. And it transforms the situation for Shakespeare post plague. He's part of a company, the Chamberlain's Men, and it's because of them we know his plays, and for them he writes. What transformation is wrought in the early 1590s that takes us up to 1595, and we suddenly know what he's writing.
- [54:08]
Dr. Daniel Swift
This sounds like a horrible thing to say, but there's a really convenient outbreak of the plague at exactly the perfect moment for Shakespeare, and that's in sort of 1593, 1594, terrible, devastating outbreak of the plague. But what it does is it kills off all his contemporaries and it kills off all his rivals, really. And even as I say that, it sounds like a horrible thing to say, but I think it's worth seeing in that way, because, again, my sort of vision of Shakespeare is someone who is profoundly pragmatic and often very opportunistic. By the late 1580s, early 1590s, there is the emergence of a kind of viable theatre industry, really. And there are quite a few playwrights writing. There are lots of playing companies, There are playhouses, because following the theatre, other people thought, hey, that's a good idea. Looks like you can make five pounds per performance, I'll build one too. And actually, the other, later playhouses, often more successful than the theatre because they've kind of learned from the negative lesson of the this. They've learned what not to do. So there is a kind of growing industry now that is stopped or shut down entirely by the plague and the outbreak of 1593. 1594 is terrible, absolutely terrible. So it devastates London. The playhouse is closed down for 18 months, really. It's in that time, actually, Shakespeare goes off and starts writing poems, which seems to be, again, another kind of clue to a constant sense of somebody who looks for other ways to write and also to make money. But by the time that the playhouses reopen again, the entire industry is kind of in tatters, in sort of disarray. And the people who were playwrights have either been killed by plague or have abandoned playwriting for something else, because playwriting is too uncertain. So they've decided to do other things. So Shakespeare has a kind of unusual status in that moment. What happens with the return of playing is that this industry, which has always been quite unruly, is much more carefully and centrally regulated by the crown. And really kind of two major playing companies are established in that moment. One of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, who is Shakespeare's company. And then there's another company called the Lord Admirals Men. These are the two major playing companies, the country. There are other companies. These are the major two. And in a sense, almost all you need to know about Shakespeare and his prospects kind of originates in this moment. That Shakespeare is now attached to a particular company of players located at a specific playhouse. But he's also what's called a sharer within the company, manages to buy his way in to have a share of the profits. And it's at that moment that he has financial stability. So there's a brilliant book called Shakespeare's Money by Robert Biermann, who speculates that Shakespeare from this moment is making 50 pounds a year, just income from his share. So we're double the magic figure of 25, which is our schoolmaster annual wage. Now, the other company, the Lord Admiral's man, are also a specific group of actors. They also have a kind of sort of totemic playwright they're attached to. That's Christopher Marlowe, who's dead. So they are really only playing old Marlowe plays, whereas the Chamberlain's Men still have Shakespeare alive so he can write new plays. And they're also housed at another playhouse. But it's in that moment with these two major companies that we have sort of financial stability for Shakespeare. The name of the company changes. It goes from the Lord Chamberlain's Men to the King's Men. The playhouse changes. So the theatre is torn down in 1598. Ultimately, the kind of litigation around it sort of overwhelms the playhouse, and the playhouse itself is moved to the bankside and becomes the Globe. But Shakespeare remains with that company, with those actors, with Cuthbert Burbage, with Richard Burbage, for the rest of his career. And that's incredibly unusual. Incredibly unusual for someone both to have a career that spans across both sides of the plague, but also incredibly unusual for an attached playwright. There are other examples, less significant examples from much later. So there's a story here which is about kind of finding a home, that lovely line from Midsummer Night's Dreamer, local habitation and a name that's what the players kind of managed to find through this incredibly turbulent process, including through plague itself, as this kind of cataclysmic event. But, yeah, I mean, see it as a kind of forest fire in a way, which clears away a huge amount of this kind of turbulent, possibly quite lively industry and causes extraordinary devastation. But then after a forest fire, there is regrowth and often growth, which is kind of sped up by the fire itself. I don't want to go too far with the forest fire metaphor, but you can see the way in which there's also a way in which this kind of cataclysm is also something that Shakespeare grows out of.
- [58:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So after all these disputes, as you said, the theater's deconstructed. We've got the Globe, we've got this new moment, and we start to know Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream and all the others that emerged in the later 1590s. And we know Shakespeare rises to conclude then, we've learned so much from listening to you. I've learned so much from reading you about the world of Shakespeare in these early years. But what final thought would you like to leave us with about why it's so important to situate him in this context?
- [59:18]
Dr. Daniel Swift
I think it's a great question. And what I would come back to in some ways is a kind of a sort of comforting lesson, I suppose, and it's partly a comforting lesson about the kind of crisis of this particular moment. Part of that is it's nice to think that even Shakespeare was uncertain at one particular moment. And part of it is also nice to think that the past offers us sort of parables, I think, which we can use to think about our present. In this particular case, the one, for me, that is a kind of meaningful thing to learn from is all the romantic stuff to do with deciding upon a career in kind of in the creative arts, being a writer, being a playwright, being a poet. And there's a set of ideas about genius and about inspiration which are centrally important, which very often people have used Shakespeare as a shorthand to discuss those ideas. But if we flip it around a slightly different way and actually we look at somebody whose commitment to work, to learning a particular sort of craft in a particular moment, you know, I'm middle aged, so I like somebody who learns from their elders. There's also a kind of. There's an image of Shakespeare here as someone who is dedicated and committed and focused in the pursuit of something which is great. I find that a kind of a moving lesson. I should also say that part of what's kind of extraordinary about Shakespeare and often quite kind of chilling in thinking about early Shakespeare is quite how much is forgotten, quite how much from that time has been forgotten. And the example I always come back to is a playwright called Thomas Watson. Who Thomas Watson was arguably the great playwright of Shakespeare's early years. And in 1598, when Shakespeare is being really praised as a great playwright, he's described in print as Watson's heir. And that's meant as a great compliment. We know nothing about Thomas Watson now. Thomas Watson is entirely forgotten. There's maybe one surviving play in Latin. So there's something moving there for me about the way in which history is this great kind of wash of things being lost really. And then actually the possibility of survival is something that I think Shakespeare profoundly believed in and it was profoundly important to him. And the way he achieved that survival was not through sitting, working on his own. It wasn't through being a solitary genius. It's actually being someone who was profoundly in company with others working alongside.
- [61:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to not just working.
- [61:37]
Dr. Daniel Swift
On something which.
- [61:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
My producer do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode. Not just the genesis. Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [61:58]
Verizon Representative
Now at Verizon, we have some big news for your peace of mind for all our customers, existing and new, we're locking in low prices for three years guaranteed on my plan and my home. That's future you peace of mind and everyone can save on a brand new phone. On MyPlan, when you trade in any phone from one of our top brands, that's new phone peace of mind. Because at Verizon, whether you're already a customer or you're just joining us, we got you Visit Verizon today. Price guarantee applies to then current base monthly rate. Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.
- [62:28]
Dan Jones
In our new season of this is History, prepare yourself for a tale of the ultimate frenemies. Two cousins locked in a bitter fight for power. From boyhood companions to deadly rivals, this is the story of King Richard ii, who becomes a magnificent but murderous tyrant. His nemesis, a dashing nobleman famous across the world. It's his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke. Will Henry be the man to stop him? The story continues. Join me, Dan Jones, on this Is History, A Dynasty to Die for, available wherever you get your podcasts.