Stanley Wells - Shakespeare & Co.

Not a new book by any means but a recommended one.

Stanley Wells, Shakespeare & Co. (Allen Lane)

It's possible that we spend too much time thinking of Shakespeare in isolation and not as part of the theatrical world of London as one among many. Stanley Wells' book here makes him central to the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre but relates him to his contemporaries and gives us a better idea of context and the business of play-making at the time.

In the early 1590's, Marlowe is the already established star and such names as Nashe, Lyly and Greene are famous names. Wells takes us through the careers, lives and work of Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson before Shakespeare works with the next generation, Thomas Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher and John Webster, Philip Massinger and one Wentworth Smith who I felt particularly sorry for because none of his plays have survived.

Sometimes one begins to wonder how many times one is going to be told the various anecdotal reports of Shakespeare's life - William the Conqueror coming before Richard the First, etc. - but of course each book must be written as if it is the first book that the reader has read on the subject. I was as grateful for all those stories several years ago as I am now for some of the less well-known reports from the lives of his contemporaries. I'm sure that some of our leading artists in the twentieth century led fulfilled and exciting lives but it's hard to see any bunch of writers as being quite as colourful as this lot. I'm usually tempted to see Shakespeare as having had a varied and interesting sex life but otherwise being a restrained and responsible character. Among this cast of brothel-keepers, spies, murderers and duellers, he looks like a paragon of virtue.

Thomas Middleton recovers from the juvenilia of The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased, described by one critic as 'the most damnable piece of flatness that has ever fallen in my way', to be working with Shakespeare by his mid-twenties as well as producing numerous titles that have survived, The Revenger's Tragedy being potentially the most interesting but the social satires such as A Chaste Maid on Cheapside somehow characteristic, with the similarities in Timon of Athens being enough to convince one of the likely collaboration. But the recommendation that comes out of this book most fervently is to read his collaboration with Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, based on the true life Mary Frith, a London character 'also known as Moll Cutpurse, a woman who dressed as a man and pursued a flamboyant and criminal lifestyle.' It is reported that at a play she,

told the company there present that she thought many of them were of opinion that she was a man, but if any of them would come to her lodging they should find out that she is a woman.

Besides these lively accounts, Wells provides a chapter on the actors, equally important influences on the plays at the time as the plays would often be written with them in mind. And he examines several textual parallels between plays by Shakespeare and others, some of which are clearly conscious references while others more likely to be borrowed or recycled. It is the sort of thing that supporters of Oxford and Marlowe's authorship claims have seized on keenly as proof of their cases. However, it is shown here to be a common occurence and not a phenomenon limited to one other author and so redundant as an argument. Wells makes various academic points about them but it is otherwise not a fearsomely academic read and likely, one would think, to be a very useful and authoritative introduction to the milieu.