Category: Chapter

Shake-Scene

Perhaps, despite the strong evidence that identifies Edward Alleyn as Robert Greene’s ‘Player’ and ‘Crow’, you are nevertheless persuaded that the upstart Crow is Shakespeare because he thinks himself ‘in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country’?  Surely the similarity between ‘Shake-scene’ and ‘Shakespeare’ is too close to be a coincidence?

Shake-scene Groatsworth of Wit Shakespeare Greene

Yet the typography of the text counts against ‘Shake-scene’ meaning ‘Shakespeare’. Throughout Groatsworth, quotations, and most names, are printed in the much clearer italic lettering rather than blackletter, even the name ‘Johannes fac totum’. Epithets (such as ‘upstart Crow’) are not.  Shake-scene is not in italic print, suggesting it is not a name, but a common noun. Being preceded by an article — ‘the… Shake-scene’ — points in the same direction; proper nouns (names) don’t need to be prefaced with ‘a’ or ‘the’.

SHAKE-STUFF

There was a similar word in use at the time: ‘shake-rag’, a term found in printed sources from 1571, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, for ‘a ragged disreputable person’.  ‘It is no marvel that shakerags [L. sordidos homines] (which have no regard of honesty) did … rail without shame’ wrote Arthur Golding in his translation of Calvin’s The Psalms of David.  Here are some more examples:

  • ‘You totter’d shake-rag’d rogues, what domineer you?’ — Anon, A Larum for London (1602).
  • ‘Pecunia, a name of one of the shake-rag goddesses in our fourth booke’ — St Augustine, tr. J.Healey, Of the City of God (1610).
  • ‘If you ask but a shake-rag who he is, he will answer, that (at the least) he is descended from the Goths, & that his bad fortune hath thus dejected him’ — Juan de Luna, The pursuit of the historie of Lazarillo de Tormez (1622).
  • ‘this shake-rag, this young impudent Rogue’ — Mateo Aleman, The Rogue (1623).
  • ‘Do you talk Shake-rag: Heart yond’s more of ‘em. I shall be Beggar-maul’d if I stay’ — Richard Brome, A Joviall Crew (1641).

By adapting ‘Shake-rag’ (beggar) into ‘Shake-scene’ (actor), Greene could not only refer to the physical vigour with which an actor such as Alleyn would stride around the stage, shaking the scenery, but also hint at a certain disreputable quality associated with the original term.

A GRAMMATICAL TEST

If you want proof that ‘Shake-scene’ is not a proper noun, and does not stand for Shakespeare, try substituting one for the other: it makes no sense for Greene to accuse this actor of being ‘in his own conceit the only Shakespeare in a country’.   It is simply another way for Greene to say ‘actor’ without repeating the words he has already used, as a substitution demonstrates: the upstart Crow is ‘in his own conceit the only actor in a country’.

The perceived ‘punning allusion to Shakespeare’s name’ is not proven and may not be there at all.  As much as we might want Greene to be referring to Shakespeare, we should not leap upon the word Shake-scene for the mere fact that it begins with the same first syllable.  Wishful thinking will lead us to see connections that the author never intended, and to identify the ‘Shake-scene’ [actor] as Shakespeare, when the main text of Groatsworth, and Greene’s previous writings, implicate Edward Alleyn, is no more valid than the tendency of some Oxfordians to see every use of the common English word ‘ever’ as an anagram pinpointing their candidate, Edward de Vere.

CONTINUE>>>


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Tiger’s Heart Wrapped in a Player’s Hide

So Robert Greene (who can be safely identified as the author of Groatsworth) had an existing beef with Edward Alleyn, had called him a Crow beautified with other’s feathers before, and through details in the main part of Groatsworth clearly identifies Alleyn (not least through the ownership of a windmill) as the wealthy Player who promised him riches but is now allowing him to die in poverty.  There are grammatical, typographical and etymological reasons why his ‘Shake-scene‘ means ‘actor’ not ‘Shakespeare’.

But what of the parodied line from the play that would later become the third part of Henry VI, originally referring to a ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’?  Surely quoting a Shakespeare play means his finger is pointed at Shakespeare?

Associations

It’s time for a short quiz.   With whom do you associate the following lines?

  1. ‘I coulda been a contender.’
  2. ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’
  3. ‘Go ahead, make my day.’
  4. ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’
  5. ‘I’ll be back.’

Arnie I'll be back memeMost people would answer Marlon Brando, Clark Gable, Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  We recall the actors who spoke the lines, not the writers who wrote them. Unless you’re a screenwriter yourself — and even if you are — it’s most unlikely that you thought of

  1. Budd Schulberg and Malcolm Johnson
  2. Sidney Howard
  3. Joseph Stinson
  4. Julius and Philip Epstein with Howard Koch
  5. James Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd.

Likewise, most of Greene’s readership, reading the line ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide’, would think of the actor who played Richard Duke of York, not the writer, whose name in any case they were unlikely to know.

edward alleyn tiger's heartShakespeare was not publicly known as the author of this play for another 27 years.  Indeed, we have no evidence he was known as the author of any play (or poem) when Groatsworth was written; ‘William Shakespeare’ would not appear on the title page of a play for another six years.  The parody of the line from The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York turns out to be yet another piece of evidence pointing towards Edward Alleyn.  The True Tragedy at this time was being performed by Lord Strange’s Men (the company for whom Greene had been writing).  Edward Alleyn, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, was established with Lord Strange’s Men by 1592.[1] As the company’s leading actor, Alleyn was the man most likely to have taken the title role and spoken these words.  Though some have argued that he wouldn’t have played York, because he is killed in Act I, the part is clearly written so as to allow it to be doubled with the part of Clarence.

Whose words?

You might argue that Greene’s letter, even though it was published at his request, wasn’t addressed to the general populace. It was addressed to three playwrights who very likely would know who wrote the line ‘Tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’.  But who was that, exactly?   The early versions of the plays that eventually became Henry VI are widely acknowledged to be co-authored, and are not universally acknowledged, even by orthodox scholars, to be by Shakespeare.

In fact Tom Merriam, who undertook a computer-based stylometric analysis of Henry VI, concluded that The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York was written by Christopher Marlowe.[2]  His opinion, shared by a number of well-respected scholars of the early twentieth century, was that Marlowe’s play was adopted and adapted by Shakespeare into the play we now know as Henry VI Part 3, a view that in 2016 was adopted, with considerable fanfare, by the editors of The New Oxford Shakespeare.

In this circumstance, Robert Greene, and ‘his quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plays’ would not have associated the ‘tiger’s heart’ line with William Shakespeare but with Marlowe, the first of those people Greene warns against the ‘upstart Crow’.  If this is so, Green’s parodic reference would be even more satisfying, tying together both his target (Alleyn) and his chief addressee.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] S. P. Cerasano, ‘Alleyn, Edward (1566–1626)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/view/article/398, accessed 22 June 2017].
[2] T. Merriam, Tamburlaine Stalks in Henry VI’, Computers and the Humanities 30, 267–280, 1996.


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Greene Was Dying in Poverty

Context matters. Careful scholars, rather than unquestioningly adopting ‘facts’ established by men in powdered wigs, should consider the exact context in which Robert Greene wrote Groatsworth in 1592.

THE THEATRE SCENE IN 1592

We have no evidence of William Shakespeare’s involvement in the London theatre scene at this time (the first evidence is dated two years later).  He was not, like Edward Alleyn, a leading tragedian of the scene-shaking variety. If he was acting before 1594, it must have been in very minor roles, since there are no reports of him. Nor is there any evidence he was known, even among playwrights, as a writer of plays. Two plays now thought to be his (the fore-runners of Henry VI Parts 1 and 3) were first mentioned in 1592, but as we’ve seen, their authorship has been disputed by orthodox scholars.  In 1594, two years after Groatsworth, the first plays of the Shakespeare canon were published, but not with his name on.

The earliest evidence of William Shakespeare’s involvement in theatre: a payment from December 1594 to shareholders of the Lord Chamberlain’s men.

No-one had mentioned Shakespeare before Robert Greene, and let’s not forget that Greene doesn’t mention Shakespeare either.  This is a possible allusion, not a factual reference. In the rest of Groatsworth, Green’s complaint against a certain actor (The Player) seems to be directed at Edward Alleyn.  In his earlier work Francesco’s Fortunes his complaint against actors is also directed at Alleyn, and compares him to the crow beautified with other’s feathers.  Is it really likely that the complaint against an actor comparing him to that same crow in the Groatsworth letter is about anyone other than Alleyn?

GREENE’S CIRCUMSTANCES IN 1592

Greene has no documented link to Shakespeare, but has a documented relationship with Alleyn.  When he wrote Groatsworth, he knew he was dying, and dying in poverty.  By contrast, Edward Alleyn was wealthy and successful, thanks to the wit and words of Greene and his fellow playwrights.  The orthodox reading is that Greene, with his dying words, takes a jealous swipe at an up-and-coming playwright no-one has heard of, but this would hardly be a dying man’s concern.

By Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4053776His chief concern, which he could hardly make more obvious, is the disparity of wealth between successful actors (‘those puppets that spake from our mouths’) and the poverty-stricken gentleman scholars (chiefly himself) who ‘spend their wits making plays’, supplying the actors with the source of their riches and fame.  From its title (A Groatsworth of Wit, Bought With A Million of Repentance), through its main text, to its accompanying letters, the focus of Groatsworth is on money, and specifically on the comparatively low monetary value placed on the ‘wit’ of Greene and his fellow writers, despite the fact that it provides actors with their entire living.[1]

The fact that the most successful of these actors has begun to believe he can do without them, plagiarising ‘the best of [them]’ with a blank verse play of his own, is little more than an irritated footnote in Greene’s furious diatribe against injustice.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] The ‘groat’ of the title was a small coin worth four pence.


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Chettle’s Apology

The outcry that followed the publication of A Groatsworth of Wit—which not only attacked actors but had accused three leading writers of scurrilous behaviour, including (dangerously in these times) atheism—led to Henry Chettle, who had shepherded the work into print ‘at his peril’, issuing an apology before the year was out.  Though his prologue to Kind-Heart’s Dream is still widely referred to as ‘Chettle’s apology to Shakespeare’, it is nothing of the sort; not even if you believe that Shakespeare is the upstart Crow.

Biographers are rather attached to the idea that the apology is aimed at Shakespeare, because in issuing the apology, Chettle says a number of pleasant things about one of the people he has upset: that he himself had ‘seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes’ and that

‘diverse of worship [i.e. several important people] have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his art’.

There is so little we know about Shakespeare the man, so little personal testimony as to his character, that we are naturally hungry for that gap to be filled. So deep is the need that biographers unconsciously ignore basic logic in order to use Chettle’s words as some kind of biographical hardcore.

IT’S ILLOGICAL, CAPTAIN

In 1998, Lukas Erne was the sixth scholar since 1874 to point out that Henry Chettle’s apology to one of the playwrights who took offence at the contents of Groatsworth of Wit cannot have been aimed at Shakespeare.[1] Chettle describes how the letter in Groatsworth, ‘written to diverse play-makers, is offensively by one or two of them taken’, and then apologises to one of these two, but not the other. Shakespeare cannot be the subject of his apology, since he is not among the group of playmakers, but (supposedly) one of the actors they are being warned about.

Scholars have argued that the two subjects of Chettle’s apology must be Marlowe and Shakespeare because neither George Peele nor Thomas Nashe would have reason to take offence at Groatsworth. Erne demonstrates this is not so: George Peele was a director of courtly pageants and an established poet with a reputation to defend, and it is unlikely he would have appreciated being called upon to ‘despise drunkenness’, ‘fly lust’, and ‘abhor those Epicures, whose loose life hath made religion loathsome to your ears’.

The second defence of Kind Heart’s Dream as an apology to Shakespeare relies upon the false premise that the word ‘quality’ in the phrase ‘the quality he professes’ refers specifically to acting.  Of the four instances the OED cites in the period 1590-1630 for ‘quality’ meaning ‘profession, occupation or business’, only one of them refers to acting, and when Shakespeare uses ‘quality’ to refer to a profession in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the ‘profession’ in question is outlawry.[2]

WHY DOES THIS READING PERSIST?

The commonly held belief that Chettle’s apology is to William Shakespeare is based on an implausible and illogical reading of the text, yet it continues to persist, despite the best efforts of Erne and others before him, for a reason Erne well understands: Shakespearean biography is so bereft of evidence of Shakespeare’s existence on the London literary scene that it cannot afford to abandon any apparent allusion to Shakespeare, even one that doesn’t bear scrutiny.

‘If we authenticate it,’ says Erne, ‘we have found a crucial milestone on Shakespeare’s artistic and social trajectory. If we don’t, a biographer writing his chapter on Shakespeare’s first years as an actor and dramatist is deprived of one of his most important narrative supports’.

Though prominent Shakespearean Brian Vickers has accepted that Chettle’s apology was not to Shakespeare, most Shakespearean biographers and scholars, desperately in need of meaningful content, have continued to pretend that it was.

In summary, Chettle’s apology is not to Shakespeare, and the upstart Crow is very likely not Shakespeare either, but with the accretion of time and authoritative repetition, both assumptions have hardened into accepted ‘facts’ and essential props of Shakespearean biography that cannot safely be removed lest the roof cave in.  Yet the continued reliance on these props by orthodox scholars, and the seeming unwillingness of most of them to question or re-evaluate the evidence, only emphasises the inherent weakness of the orthodox position.  The alternative is described by Lukas Erne:

‘Stripping bare our image of Shakespeare of four centuries of (mis-)interpretation is hermeneutically impossible. If it were possible, the results of a biographer might be less than rewarding, both aesthetically and economically. Some of the evidence which generations of Shakespeareans have hardened into fact would become ambiguous, riddled with difficulties. The figure we seem to know might take on shady contours and the character hidden behind it would become difficult to relate to.’ [3]

It sounds very much like the Shakespeare authorship question.

With Chettle’s apology removed, and the upstart Crow under a serious question-mark, it is time to start reviewing what evidence we have that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was known as a writer.

TO BE CONTINUED>>>

[1] Lukas Erne, ‘Biography and Mythography: Rereading Chettle’s Alleged Apology to Shakespeare’, English Studies Vol 79, 1998, p.435.

[2] The Two Gentlemen of Verona, IV.i.56.

[3] Lukas Erne, op cit, p.439.

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Posted on by Dr Barber