It is rare these days to read a scholarly book that is as beautifully written as Peter Thomson’s Shakespeare’s Professional Career. To enter the overtrodden ground of Shakespearean biography and politics can be a daunting prospect for reader and writer alike, but Thomson, with his lively pen and sharp, witty mind, makes it easy and pleasant to go over what we think we already know and, with deceptive ease, offers new and interesting insights from his unusual perspective.
This is not, in fact, a biography of Shakespeare but an account of the professional world he inhabited, and the book offers a number of plausible speculations about what might well have been the case in that much-explored terrain. Shakespeare himself manages to remain a somewhat shadowy presence in this book, with center stage reserved for the conditions which determined and dominated the career of people tied to the theatre by choice or by circumstance. Thomson discusses the surrounding, dependent activities which allowed the theatre to develop and exist: prostitution, acting, catering, transportation, bull- and bear-baiting, hostelry, building and architecture–are all seen with a fine synoptic eye, and related to the study with a strong sense of their economic and political interconnectedness. Thus Thomson offers a sweeping but delightfully detailed view of the rushing excitement of the often seedy, but never dull, world of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre.
Shakespeare functions here as a point of reference–as a prime example, rather than as a model. Thomson allows himself to suggest the nature of Shakespeare’s greatness though he does not call it that and the nature of Shakespeare’s contribution to the drama. He writes:
By the time Shakespeare left the theatre, the national drama had assimilated a method of recording human behavior that gave due recognition to its complexity. Shakespeare was both the major inspirer of this shift, and its supreme exemplar.
“Shakespeare,” he goes on, “empowered his actors as no European playwright had done before him.” He “invented character by building on role.”
Thomson has chapters on patronage, on publishing conditions and the likely and known fates of the play texts, on censorship, and on the often wicked rivalry of the playhouses. He writes about the audiences and their history, of the ways in which audiences were perceived and occasionally feared by the authorities, and what was done to oversee and control them.
The skills and conditions of work for actors are treated in fascinating detail. There are references to the chief actors of the time and also to the lesser, those who acted because it was an available job. Thomson salubriously reminds us that “‘bricklayer’ Jonson was emerging as a substantial playwright…plays were basic commodities, more easily replaced than players.” The business of art has always been the chief force behind its production and success or failure.
In the chapters on the all-important subject of patronage, Thomson takes full account of the relation of the court to the theatre and notes the ways in which the court appropriated the language and forms of theatrical performance for its political purposes. At Elizabeth’s court, he notes, the actors were dependent on their sovereign for their very ability to survive. As later events were to show, the burgeoning animosity to the theatre in increasingly powerful social factions meant that Elizabeth’s interest in plays and the ceremony of courtly performances was a primary factor in keeping the playhouses open and the actors employed.
A less satisfying experience is the reading of James C. Humes’s Citizen Shakespeare. The author, we are several times told, was a speechwriter to three presidents a fact that wiser writers have concealed. The book gives its author away constantly by its frequent paralleling of the lives of Shakespeare and Churchill. “Like Shakespeare, Churchill lacked a university degree, and like Shakespeare, Churchill wrote for profit. Shakespeare and Churchill,” Humes confidently tells us, “were both conservative in ideals, but romantics in imagination.”
There is nothing consequential about Shakespeare that is new here. Humes’s hagiography is, however, knowledgeable in a conservative fashion, and its author unselfconsciously uses passages from the plays to demonstrate Shakespeare’s thinking on a variety of subjects. But his narrative, larded as it is with references to television situation comedy, Hollywood, contemporary culture, bad novels, etc., tends to become irritating.
Finally, the author displays a remarkable confidence in his judgments about the world of Shakespeare and his own. Of Merchant, for example, he states, “The only praiseworthy character is Portia.” Or, on Hamlet: “The poetry in Hamlet is unequalled.” That is it–no argument, no discussion and no contemplation of the meaning of the statement itself. Shakespeare is Humes’s mentor. Shakespeare is always right.
