The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘vulgar’ (he means ordinary people; the phrase is not here pejorative), like ‘Shakespeare’s tragedies, where the Comedian rides when the Tragedian stands on tip-toe: faith, it should please all, like Prince Hamlet’. 43
    In All’s Well , the mingling of tones is particularly elusive. Its central narrative is based on old folk-motifs (‘Healing the King’, ‘The Clever Wench’), and there is a jarring between this fairy-tale tendency and the more modern timbre of scepticism and paradox. We are lulled by the sweet autumnal melancholy of the verse, and then we are laughed at for giving in so easily. With their intrinsic ambiguities, and their testing of credibilities, the problem plays have been called ‘Mannerist’ 44 - in other words, they share something with the distorted figures and perplexing perspectives of mid-sixteenth-century Italian painters like Parmigianino and Bronzino.
    The heyday of Jacobean tragicomedy comes later - Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case , Massinger - but already in 1603 John Marston had produced a very idiosyncratic, urban type of tragicomedy, The Malcontent , which showed how the form could be adapted to the concurrent taste for satire and topicality. This play has analogies with Measure and was probably another spur - a competitive one - to Shakespeare. 45
    A simple and beautiful synopsis of these plays’ appeal is found in a couplet from Othello -
     
These sentences to sugar or to gall,
Being strong on both sides, are equivocal. (1.3.216-17)
     
    To paraphrase prosaically - these sentences tend equally to sweetness or to bitterness, both of these qualities being powerfully present in them. The lines are spoken by Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, and have their own business within the dramatic moment, but extracted they serve as a kind of emblem or motto for Shakespeare’s tragicomedies.
     
    If the tragicomedies balance, more or less measure for measure, their helpings of sugar and gall, Timon of Athens is pure gall. It is the bleakest of all Shakespeare’s plays, and vies with Cymbeline (though for different reasons) as the least staged work of Shakespeare’s mature years. It dramatizes a story he found in Plutarch’s Lives , of a rich Athenian whose followers and flatterers deserted him when the money ran out, and who turned his back on the world and lived wild in the woods: ‘Timon misanthropos ’. The play has some magnificent patches of poetry, but the overall tone is harsh.
    As it comes down to us - in the only contemporary text available, that of the 1623 Folio - Timon seems still in parts rough, unpolished, with loose ends ungathered. One reason for this irregularity is that the play was a collaboration. Shakespeare’s co-author was Thomas Middleton, a Londoner in his early twenties: a rising young star. 46 He had begun as a poet in the satirical vein of Marston. His Microcynicon (1599), with its ‘six Snarling Satyres’, had been among the ‘unseemly’ works called in by the Archbishop’s censors in 1599. In the new century he began to work in the theatre, initially for the Admiral’s Men, chief rivals of Shakespeare’s company. Henslowe records payment to him in May 1602 for his contribution to a lost historical drama (‘Caesar’s Fall’, also called ‘Two Shapes’), a patchwork collaboration that also involved Dekker, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday and the young John Webster. Then comes the wonderful series of brash, smutty ‘city comedies’ that made his name - The Phoenix was performed at court at Christmas 1603, followed over the next few years by The Family of Love , A Trick to Catch the Old One , A Mad World, my Masters , The Puritan (also called The Widow of Watling Street ), Your Five Gallants and others, mostly written for the children’s companies. Jonson called Middleton a ‘base fellow’, but the list of authors he disliked was a long one. Versatile, prolific and full of promise, Middleton was a prize catch