THE STAGE: To Man From Mankind's Heart

(4 of 10)

success. He wrote speedily—his editors noted that his manuscripts were scarcely ever blotted—and turned out an average of two plays a year. Plots to Shakespeare were like pots to Merlin: any borrowed tub, from Holinshed's Chronicles to Plutarch's Lives, would do to mix the magic in. One of the intellectuals of the day, Robert Greene, addressing his university-trained colleagues, Nashe, Peele and Marlowe, sneered at the "upstart crow, beautified with our feathers." But Londoners worshiped him.

The city whose temper Shakespeare had caught was in a ferment. In the "quick forge and working-house of thought," Elizabethan London was minting a new breed: Renaissance man. Never was the Englishman more Latin; bristling with Spanish pride at personal indignities, Italianate in his boastful womanizing, French in his world-playful wit. After the Spanish Armada went down (1588), England ruled the waves, and no one had ever so masterfully ruled England as Elizabeth I. The Elizabethan was agape at the sheer wonder of himself: "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!"

Dazzled by life, the Elizabethan was nonetheless on familiar terms with death.

Plagues riddled London. The severed heads of criminals rotted in the sun at Tyburn Tree. The acme of the hangman's art was to cut his man down and eviscerate him while still alive; a priest was once heard saying his prayers even as his heart palpitated in the hangman's palm. Ben Jonson killed a man in a duel; "Kit" Marlowe was stabbed to death in a tavern" brawl. The Elizabethans lived dangerously, and while they lived, they were asmile with daring. Shakespeare held a magnifying glass to the spirit of his age, and set the unroofed circle of the Globe's "wood en O" blazing with his Muse of Fire.

Of an afternoon, when the white pennant rippled on the flagstaff of the Globe, signifying the performance of a play, the Thames was a bazaar of haggling, blue-coated boatmen ferrying several thousand eager customers crossriver to the prison district of the Clink, where the playhouses had retreated from puritanical city magistrates. The fops gossiped and smoked onstage. Jostling one another and munching sausages in the penny standing room of the pit were the groundlings and "stinkards," men who had unfurled canvas with Drake, but could not read or write. From next door at the Paris Garden came the snarls of mastiffs as they leaped at the throat of Harry Hunks, a chained bear that snapped at them with his sawed-down teeth and clawed some into bloody silence. This was the competition for Romeo and Juliet. No one sensed the paradox of beauty and the bestial more keenly than Shakespeare:

How with this rage shall beauty hold a

plea, Whose action is no stronger than a

flower?

The Dark Vision. Whatever roles Shakespeare played onstage (some think his favorite part was the ghost in Hamlet), offstage he was a prudent investor and a bit of a snob. He bought a piece of the players' company, a piece of the Globe, and eventually paid £60 for New Place, the second grandest house in Stratford. In 1596 his father pushed his long-dormant claim to a coat of arms, and the Shakespeares