Цитаты из книги Shakespeare: A Life

Shakespeare's will begins with a declaration very similar to openings found in some of the 134 wills, made by other theatre people, which still exist from that time for comparison:

In the name of God Amen. I William Shackspeare of Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwickshire gent., in perfect health & memory God be praised, do make & ordain this my last will & testament in manner & form following. That is to say first, I commend my Soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping & assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour to be made partaker of life everlasting. And my body to the earth whereof it is made.

Even before he had an indoor stage, he had begun the series which includes Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. These plays are naïvely presentational, conciliatory in mood, less gestured and less emphatically structured than anything he had done before. They recall Tudor dramatic romances of his youth, as well as the miracle works of late medieval times. Why does he seem to reach back? In avoiding the limits of modern realism, logic, and literalness he might use his art to exploit rich areas of popular romance. But there is something more personal in his aims, if one judges from his insistent return to variations upon only a few themes. From the time of King Lear, he appears to have drawn on an effort he was making to set himself right with people he cared for, and perhaps to overcome some aspects of estrangement in his absences from home.

Under Queen Elizabeth, actors had noble patronage. In James's reign they had royal patronage, and the patent (renewed in 1619 and again with slight changes after James's death) testifies to the prominence of the troupe henceforth known as the King's Servants, or the King's men or players.

When the epidemic lets up, declares the patent, Shakespeare's troupe may act in their 'usual house called the Globe', or in any city, university town, or borough in the realm. Justices, mayors, and other officers are to 'permit and suffer' them to perform in shows without hindrance, and must allow 'such former courtesies as hath been given to men of their place and quality'. The patent adds that any 'further favour you shall show to these our servants for our sake we shall take kindly at your hands'.

James required a court of splendour with art, masques, and stage-plays to hold the devotion of his entourage, beguile domestic enemies, and impress foreign envoys. Ten days after arriving in London he unexpectedly ordered through his secretary that the Keeper of the Privy Seal, pro tem -- Lord Cecil --

issue 'letters patent' to elevate Shakespeare's actors. Drawn up two days later, and dated 19 May 1603, the royal patent (here quoted in modern spelling) has a touch of Polonius's style in authorizing and licensing: 'these our servants Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley', and the rest of their acting associates

freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing comedies, tragedies, histories, interludes, morals, pastorals, stage plays and such like as they have already studied or hereafter shall use or study, as well for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them during our pleasure. . .

Under Queen Elizabeth, actors had noble patronage. In James's reign they had royal patronage, and the patent (renewed in 1619 and again with slight changes after James's death) testifies to the prominence of the troupe henceforth known as the King's Servants, or the King's men or players.

15 THE KING'S SERVANTS These fellows have some soul, And such a one do I profess myself -- for, sir, It is as sure as you are Roderigo, Were I the Moor I would not be Iago. In following him I follow but myself Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so for my peculiar end. For when my outward action cloth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In compliment extern, 'tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.

( Iago, Othello)

What, at the wheels of Caesar? Art thou led in triumph?

( Lucio, Measure for Measure)

To speed up their writing, most playwrights preferred to collaborate. For example among eighty-nine scripts that Henslowe of the Rose tells us about in detail, fifty-five are jointly written, and only thirty-four are single-author plays. 36 In a small collaborative team, a writer might specialize in working up a few kinds of action, scene, or situation.

An actor who could write a good play by himself was a rarity, but in Elizabeth's time he would not have seemed 'literary' or set apart. It is clear enough that Shakespeare coveted the normalcy of being a group member, just as his father for years, and at cost to himself, had served with his aldermanic brethren at Stratford. The group offered consoling protections. A measure of anonymity, a guise of ordinariness, in time suited Shakespeare well -- and he and his fellows would have thought of a play as a collective event. A script existed, above all, for performance, when it became a play-in-being. Indeed, their acceptance of the notion of a play as a group activity -- not as words on a page -- was one of the actors' most valuable legacies from the medieval theatre.

Still almost all London troupes were alike in one way. They were subject to a tight repertory system. Shakespeare knew its demands well, and they seem hard to imagine. A company in good, or ideal, times acted on every afternoon except Sundays and during Lent; they put on a different play each working day of the week, though some plays would be repeated in the weeks ahead. For example, the Admiral's men typically put on fifteen different titles in the course of twenty-seven playing days. An actor usually had to keep at least thirty parts in his memory, many more if he doubled in minor roles. It would have been normal for Shakespeare (if he worked as a typical hireling) to take a hundred small parts in a season. A leading actor such as Edward Alleyn or Richard Burbage, in any case, memorized about 800 lines for a part, and kept in mind up to 4,800 lines in a week.

A modern critic asks if it is necessary, after all, that we 'run away from the identification of Prospero with Shakespeare?' Probably not. Rather as the dramatist does, the magician assembles and disciplines an almost unmanageable world, heads his people along certain paths, and gives them situations to which they must react. The magician's view of the transience of all things, for example, matches his creator's outlook as often expressed, as when Prospero thinks of the melting of 'the great globe itself' and of our 'insubstantial pageant' which will leave, at last,

not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare had used instrumental effects at times, perhaps, as an artistic crutch to make up for a play's vagueness, confusion, or feeble effects (his poorest work may be lost to us, or expunged from revised texts that exist). Music is sparingly used in the early comedies, but two crucial songs at the end of Love's Labour's Lost and a music of enchantment in the Dream anticipate a sudden, marvellous development in As You Like It, in which instrumental music and song reinforce theme after theme, such as time's passing, the humour of 'holiday', the Forest of Arden's delights, or man's ingratitude. Even so, the late romances are musically his most excitingly innovative works. New facilities at Blackfriars, and then at the Globe, must have led him to experiment, and music in Cymbeline or The Tempest becomes, in an Elizabethan way, 'an act of faith', reinforcing present but elusive meanings in the work's action.