This doorway “probably” led to a room used as a dressing room. Does the word “probably” attach to “used by the Bard” as well? The heading, after all, calls it a ‘Shakespeare’ doorway. Keep those scare quotes firmly attached, won’t you? We don’t want to sew a new crop of Assumption in the field of Myth. Let’s drill a little deeper into this Guardian article from a fortnight ago.
We shan’t object to the idea that the room “likely” was used as a dressing room when acting companies visited. Though as for calling Kings Lynn’s Guildhall “the UK’s oldest working theatre”, both London’s Drury Lane and Bristol’s Old Vic would like a word. A guildhall is no more a theatre than a school hall is. But the provinces are desperate for tourists, and this is how the venue (now an Arts Centre) represents itself.
Records of the Kings Lynn Corporation show the following companies visited the town:
Queen’s Men in 1586, 1587, 1588-89, June 1591, July 1595, 1596
Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1586
Earl of Essex’s Men in 1591
Earl of Pembroke’s Men in 1592-93
Earl of Derby’s Men in 1594
Earl of Worcester’s Men in 1598-91
The Guardian reports that “Shakespeare and his company were believed to be on tour in King’s Lynn in 1592-93” and that “last year the theatre identified floorboards believed to have formed part of a stage once trodden by the Bard.”
That article claims that in 1593, “the borough paid Shakespeare’s company to perform there.” (In the reductive shorthand of journalism, Pembroke’s Men is now “Shakespeare’s company” even though the source states Pembroke’s “was by no means his company”.2 Naturally Tim FitzHigham, the Guildhall’s creative director is thrilled.
“Experts are now confidently saying these are the floorboards Shakespeare would have trodden,” he said. “It makes this building important nationally and internationally.”
Asserting things to make them true is a fundamental principle of a certain tourist-focused brand of Shakespeare scholarship. The confident experts will presumably be a combination of Matthew Woodcock, who notes Pembroke’s Men being paid for Kings Lynn performances in 1592-3, and Andrew Gurr, who argued that, in Woodcock’s words,
“Details of staging reflected in the stage directions found in the early quarto and octavo versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI suggest the presence of the author when they were first staged. Replications of visual details evoked in these stage directions betrays the hand of a writer who was familiar with the descriptive minutiae of the plays’ key source, Holinshed’s Chronicles.”
We would expect the author to be familiar with the source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, and there’s no reason he wouldn’t betray that familiarity in the stage directions. So what is Gurr’s argument that the author had to be present when the plays were being staged in Norfolk?
I dug out Gurr's The Shakespearean Playing Companies (1996) and got the lowdown. Gurr writes with great authority (and is widely relied upon) but you don’t have to look very far to find evidence that an authoritative tone is not the same as factually reliable. For example, he says of Thomas Nashe, “He composed Dido with Marlowe at Cambridge” (261) and we know nothing of the sort. This is a guess presented as a fact. His research into the playing companies is tremendous, and the book is a monumental achievement. Yet he suffers the same problem that all orthodox Shakespeare scholars have when looking at the historical record: Shakespeare (more often than not) isn’t there.
He certainly isn’t there (in the records) in the period 1592-3, when the Earl of Pembroke’s company played at Kings Lynn. The names Shakespeare doesn’t appear in any literary records until June 1593, and not in any theatrical ones until March 1595 (recording performances in December 1594).
Here’s something we can agree on:
“Shakespeare’s place in any of the early companies is uncertain.” (Gurr, 271)
Yet Gurr cannot stick with uncertainty. He begins well enough, flagging up that this is guesswork, but then forgets that he is making things up:
“In this farrago of speculative assignments to company it is impossible not to add the question of Shakespeare’s membership. His name does not appear in any of the companies before the Chamberlain’s Men some time after 1594, but his plays do. If a company’s performance of his plays is anything to go by, they must give clues to his playing allegiances. That puts him in Strange’s before 1592, when he might have composed his three pages of Sir Thomas More, and Pembroke’s after.” (Gurr, 270, my emphasis)
“If a company’s performance of his plays is anything to go by,” then this author flits between Strange’s, Pembroke’s and Sussex’s in this period; but this is a very big ‘if’. It is founded on the popular and indeed traditional idea of Shakespeare as a combined writer-actor, yet we have no evidence at all that the person writing these plays was an actor at this time. Gurr goes further, saying,
“We can add to those hints a few points from Robert Greene’s sour and dying words …[in] late September 1592.”
He is talking, of course, about the ‘upstart Crow’ reference in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, words that in the summer of 1592 are a much better fit for Edward Alleyne than for William Shaksper.3 From this traditional misinterpretation of Groatsworth, Gurr concludes,
“Shakespeare was evidently still serving as a player that summer.”
Yet this is not evident at all. Because there is literally no evidence from this time that Shakespeare (or Shaksper) was “serving as a player”.
Gurr rests his argument also on Chettle’s apology being to Shakespeare, which it cannot logically be, as Lukas Erne pointed out very capably two years after Gurr’s book was published.4 We can’t condemn Gurr for not knowing about the several previous attempts to establish that Chettle’s apology could not have been to Shakespeare; he was relying as most scholars do on the consensus of opinion being correct. But he nevertheless makes some egregious leaps from the incorrect ‘factoid’.
Regarding Chettle saying that one of the offended people (wrongly assumed to be Shakespeare) is “exelent in the qualitie he professes”, Gurr decides
“it seems to say that Chettle had met the man and had seen him performing some time after Greene’s pamphlet appeared.” (270)
This flight of fancy is extended further (in a scholarly-sounding way if you are convinced of Gurr’s premise):
“It is most likely that Shakespeare performed in Pembroke’s in mid-1592 in 3 Henry VI and whatever other plays Chettle saw him in.” (271)
The leaps are astounding. And then we reach the section that was referenced in the Guardian article above, which begins:
“But I am almost convinced that Shakespeare was with his plays in Pembroke’s Company at the Theatre in 1592 and 1593.”
Almost convinced, that’s nice. Remember, this is the fundamental source of “Experts are now confidently saying these are the floorboards Shakespeare would have trodden.” And here’s the rationale, that thing about the stage directions.
One of the stage directions is from The Contention (which would be rewritten and appear in the Folio, thirty years later, as 2 Henry VI). One is from Richard Duke of York (later to become 3 Henry VI). In the Folio versions, both stage directions are simplified. This can be read as an editorial decision. A “house style” descends on these disparately produced texts as they are brought together into this prestigious volume; simpler stage directions are one aspect of the Folio’s house style.
Gurr, however, reads a great deal into the longer stage directions in the early plays, saying they “suggest an influence on them that came from a reader closely familiar with their source in Holinshed.” (271). This genuinely seems a ludicrous point. Of course the author of these plays (not just the ‘reader’, the writer) is familiar with the stories’ source, and this can be reflected throughout the playtext (i.e. including the stage directions). What are these stage directions?
Stage Direction 1 (Contention):
“enter the Duke of Somerset, and Richard fighting, and Richard kils him under the signe of the Castle in saint Albones”
In the text of Contention, following this longer direction (the 2H6 direction ends at ‘fighting’), Richard is a bit more explicit than in the Folio and says, “Whats here, the signe of the Castle? / Then the prophesie is come to passe.”
Gurr says,
“The players might have taken the hint about a hanging sign from the text, but it would have helped if the author were on hand to confirm the details. The greater emphasis given in the Contention’s version is consistent with a writer who remembered the staged version and its use of an ale-house sign.” (271, my emphasis)
This is mad. Do the players not know their business? What about all the other authors of the plays they perform? Do they need THEM on hand to confirm things like this? How on earth can this be taken as some kind of evidence that the author of the play is travelling with them? Surely the point of such explicit instructions is to make sure there is enough guidance in the text for the players not to need the author on hand?
Stage Direction 2 (Richard Duke of York):
“Enter Clifford wounded, with an arrow in his necke”
The detail is from Holinshead. In the Folio’s 3H6 it simply says, ‘Enter Clifford wounded’.
Poor Gurr. Desperate to put Shakespeare where everyone feels he needs to be (despite a complete lack of evidence in any of the records that nevertheless name numerous other players in these early companies), he says:
“This replication of visual details from the play’s sources… makes it almost certain that Shakespeare was on hand when Pembroke’s staged the play in 1592-3. These features were not registered in the authorial manuscripts of the plays that were much later used to print the Folio texts.” (271, my emphasis).
Authorial manuscripts? Don’t get me started.
Again I find myself whistling the tune from the very first year of my PhD when I brought my science-trained brain to what passes for Shakespeare biography. Where’s your evidence? Where’s your evidence? Where’s your evidence?
Everywhere you poke the Shakespeare consensus, you find foundations of sand.
Forgive them. It can be hard to make archaeology newsworthy.
Woodcock, Matthew, ‘The Case for Placing Shakespeare in Kings Lynn’, https://westnorfolkartists.org/artscentre/pdfs/The_Case_for_Placing_Shakespeare_in_KL.pdf, p.1. Thanks to the SOF for the link.
Ibid, p.2.
Bull, P. (2020). Tired with a Peacock’s Tail: All Eyes on the Upstart Crow. English Studies, 101(3), 284–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2020.1717829 There are numerous published non-Stratfordian arguments for Alleyn as the upstart Crow, but this is, I believe, the only one that has successfully passed the peer-review process.
Erne, L. (1998). Biography and mythography: Rereading Chettle’s alleged apology to Shakespeare. English Studies, 79(5), 430–440. https://doi.org/10.1080/00138389808599146
It's not like the real history isn't as fascinating as the fake. Actually, more so. Goes to show, a lie gets twice around the world before the truth gets out of bed.
That‘s totally crazy. And scary… how can it be so easy to make people believe ANYTHING? And the worst thing is, we‘re not talking about politicians, we‘re talking about scholars. Those arguments are totally ridiculous.