Shakespeare before he was famous

Shakespeare at Thirty offers an original account of Shakespeare’s early career by returning to a moment before his fame was assured: the spring of 1594, when he turned thirty amid plague closures, censorship, social upheaval, financial insecurity, and professional uncertainty. Instead of reading Shakespeare’s beginnings through the lens of later achievement, Rory Loughnane reconstructs the precarious world in which a young actor-writer learned his craft and forged a path through a rapidly developing theatre scene.

In this excerpt, Loughnane imagines what might have happened if Shakespeare had died during the plague of 1592–93, still a young writer.

IF SHAKESPEARE HAD PERISHED IN THE PLAGUE OF 1592–93—HE HAD ONCE MORE FORTUNATELY BEEN SPARED IN AN OUTBREAK WHERE MANY OTHERS DIED—WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN HIS LITERARY LEGACY? The example of Marlowe is sometimes given, with critics suggesting Marlowe could claim the advantage at this stage of their careers. The authorship of the Henry VI plays, and possibly Edward III, complicates this further as any suggestion Shakespeare bolstered the genre of English history is nuanced by the early involvement of Marlowe, Nashe, and others. Marlowe’s early demise is one of the great losses in the history of world literature. What unwritten works were lost due to the Deptford brawl? Would he have fared like Lyly, burning bright before diminishing as fashions changed? Or would he have adapted, moving with the times and driving innovation? The case of Edward II, so different in ways to the big-speech grand-standing of Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, suggests the latter. We now know Shakespeare would continue to develop as a creative artist over his extended career, though Marlowe’s potential remained unrealised, halted forever in May 1593. We have, then, little problem in appraising Marlowe’s canon—disputed in some respects though it is—and celebrating his extraordinary contribution to the evolution of English drama. With Shakespeare, however, because we know what he went on to do, it is challenging to shift our understanding of his contribution to literature in a time-limited way. The question of what if Shakespeare had perished at

twenty-nine or thirty forces us somehow to resist the instinctual negative thought about what would have been lost (Twelfth Night! Othello! King Lear! The Tempest!) rather than to assess positively what had already been achieved.

What he did achieve at this early age was unlike that of any of his peers, including Marlowe, when assessed in its totality. He demonstrates at an early stage a remarkable capacity to work across genre. His unitary focus on the literary form of drama until the plague—unlike Marlowe, for example, who was producing translations, plays, and poems—can make us somehow understate his high degree of experimentalism. Though generic division can sometimes seem a little blunt, young Shakespeare tried his hand at romantic comedy, tragedy (Roman and domestic), and chronicle English history. He did not play it safe in any way. While I have observed repeatedly young Shakespeare’s desire to provoke and be sensational, he was fearless also in attempting to secure mastery across various genres. This is easier than it sounds: he could, like Marlowe or Lyly, have stuck to a genre (tragedy in Marlowe’s case, comedy in Lyly’s) he felt most comfortable writing. This is not a negative comment against those Canterbury authors, whose own craft in their genre of choice evolved. Perhaps Shakespeare never demonstrated the same mastery as Marlowe had in tragedy by this time, but he was also much more diverse in his range of interests and the kinds of characters and plots he wrote. We could characterise this as the restless searching of someone who does not yet know what suits them best, but as we know from Shakespeare’s subsequent long career, this sort of generic diversity is a lifelong condition and not symptomatic of youth. His willingness to experiment generically, if not necessarily formally, is what helps set him apart: the mocking jibe about Johannes factotum pinpoints precisely where Shakespeare is at creatively at this juncture of his career. Whoever thought to tease Shakespeare did not see the bigger picture. Rather than master one genre, he was developing mastery in each that he was attempting, building towards a larger creative canvas yet to be filled in. Channelling his talent with intent, young Shakespeare is a study in ambition.

It seems safe to say that Shakespeare would never have become ‘Shakespeare’, the global literary phenomenon, the benchmark, if he had died at this age. If we had only the early works we have been exploring in this book, I suspect there would be by now a longstanding critical narrative about these two shooting stars, Marlowe and Shakespeare, who wrote plays of such vigour, passion, and ingenuity that they influenced, along with more minor figures such as Kyd, Greene, Nashe, and Peele, the next generation of dramatists to emerge. But, as with any good thought experiment, this conjectured critical narrative can also be cast in doubt. None of the plays Shakespeare had a hand in except for Arden of Faversham were published by the time of such an imagined early plague death. Titus Andronicus and the alternative version of 2 Henry VI, Contention, would find print in 1594. Edward III and the alternative version of 3 Henry VI, True Tragedy, followed in 1595. None of these feature Shakespeare’s name on their title pages. Would Richard III ever be completed, performed, and published? Who would have thought to sell The Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Taming of the Shrew, both First Folio texts and therefore left unpublished for some 30 years? As Shakespeare died in this scenario, the Folio versions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI would never have been created, while, perhaps instructively, the Nashe–Marlowe prequel underlying 1 Henry VI, later adapted by Shakespeare but unpublished until the First Folio, would not seem likely to have reached print. Would Shakespeare’s early death have made his name in print, like Marlowe’s? Well, this seems unlikely unless his death had been notorious in some way—like those of Greene or Marlowe—and, as we have seen, Shakespeare generally preferred to play it safe. In such a scenario, would we have simply lost most of the early canon? In other words, would there have even been an author figure identifiable as ‘Shakespeare’?

Let us consider another scenario. Attribution studies have developed in recent decades so that we can say with relative confidence that Author X wrote this part of a play, while Author Y wrote other parts, but still this is undertaken in broad strokes and with admitted residual uncertainties. As such work relies upon distinguishing the features of one author from another or many others working at that time, it is dependent upon a reliable authorial canon for each dramatist: that is, to say something is Shakespearean or Nasheian, we need to have enough reliably attributed work by that author to compare the case study text to.

So, say, in some alternative universe, versions of most of the plays (barring 1 Henry VI) make it to print in anonymous single-text publications, like so many plays from this period. Would we, working from the positive attributions of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, have looked to this shadowy figure of ‘William Shakespeare’ as a candidate author for this raft of otherwise unattributed works? In these circumstances, it seems unlikely anyone could reconstruct the early dramatic canon of this young man from Stratford-upon-Avon, who, imagined London records tell us, perished along with many others during the worst visitation. Why would anyone think this shadowy figure—perhaps comparable to Watson, Peele, or Kyd, with some uncertain claim to certain works—had the potential, once his ‘complete works’ were preserved, to go on to be the world’s most acclaimed writer?

A final scenario, and perhaps the biggest what-if of any of these, is whether Shakespeare’s early death would have proven the death blow to the so-called golden age of English theatre? ‘Shakespeare’ is so intertwined with our understanding of this ‘golden age’ that it is challenging to remove his person and output from the situation. So, too—and this is far beyond the coverage of this book—the mythography of Shakespeare and this age, and its implication in British imperial expansion and the spread of Anglophone culture, makes us forget that Shakespeare, the biological agent, could have stepped out of time at any point and that nothing about either what he did or how his works were subsequently used was inevitable. I think there is little reason to suspect the theatre scene grinds to a halt without Shakespeare’s involvement—he was thereafter one contributor to one company within a much wider scene moving forward—not least as there was a new generation of dramatists who would emerge in the later 1590s. The scene would have been different without him, of course, and Shakespeare’s success and creative brilliance must have buoyed it and sustained new work and engagement, if not inspiration, but it would not have been devastated.

Still, Shakespeare did not die young, so these scenarios are moot. He survived, many of his works were later preserved via print, and the idea of a period-specific ‘early’ section of his career is something that critics, including myself, can discuss in relation to specific works and their writing within a specific context, much of which is the subject of this book. At the end of his ‘Shakespeare at Thirty’, John Berryman seemed almost giddy in thinking about what was next for his writing hero and looked beyond thirty to the ‘wilderness of dramatic literature, or garden, or palace, to be created in the six years coming’. Doubtless reflecting upon Shakespeare’s early achievements and subsequent pathway to literary immortality made him think about his own present, future, and mortality.

In concluding, then, we must still reckon with the frailty of life and the ever-uncertain actualisation of potential until it is actualised. To have an early period, you need to live beyond it. To understand Shakespeare’s outlook as he approached his thirtieth birthday, we must break the hour-glass, stop the clock, and remember to forget about what comes next, for that is precisely all Shakespeare knew at that time about the future, just as all of us writing or reading now do not know what will happen next or how long we have left to live. How many extraordinarily gifted creatives have either come of age at the wrong time or into the wrong set of circumstances, when any possibility of following through on their potential was lost? How many have died young? Or had their professional and/or creative opportunities shut down because of circumstances outside their control? Or how many lost or destroyed handwritten manuscripts or printed works—or, for that matter, songs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, textiles, and any other human-made creation—have made us unaware of what some people, especially young people, were once capable of? We admire Shakespeare in part because of the totality of his achievement, a staggering contribution to world literature, but that achievement is known because of the preservation of his creative labour: a textual certainty rather than a nebulous acclamation.

Ultimately, the lesson of Shakespeare’s youth—one characterised by missteps as well as progressions—is that creative talent never comes fully formed. Approaching Shakespeare’s early career chronologically allows us to see this gradual development in real time, without the dis-tortion of later achievements. It reminds us that the early works must be understood on their own terms, not through the lens of what was yet to come, revealing a writer still experimenting and discovering his voice.

About the author

Rory Loughnane is a Reader in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. His many books include Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594 and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Authorship. He is overseeing a new Oxford edition of the collected works of Christopher Marlowe.