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In 1598, Shakespeare was thirty-four: a player, shareholder, and playwright of the Lord Chamberlains Company of London. Elizabeth I was in the fortieth year of her reign. Unmarried and without an heir, she would be dead within five years, but in the late 1590s she ruled a country at peace and a capital city brimming with theatrical activity.
The Lord Chamberlains Men were only one of a dozen acting troupes supported by noble patrons. Performing at The Theatre and The Curtain in Shoreditch, just north of the London city walls, as well as by invitation at Court and at the London law schools, the Lord Chamberlains Men had a dizzying number of plays in their repertory, many written by their popular shareholder Shakespeare for his fellow players Richard Burbage, John Heminges, Will Kempe, and six other master actors, along with hired men and apprentices of their company. In 1598, the Company played Loves Labours Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Part I, Romeo and Juliet, and The Taming of the Shrew, as well as Ben Jonsons Every Man in His Humour. In the following year, after a dispute with their landlord, the troupe would come by night and dismantle The Theatre, carrying the lumber across the city and building a new theaterthe Globeon the banks south of the Thames, using the very boards they had played on in Shoreditch.
South of the city, in their new theater, they played near their great rival company, the Lord Admirals Men, whose Rose Theatre, managed by the shrewd and meticulous Philip Henslowe, showcased Henslowes brilliant son-in-law, the actor Edward Alleyn, as Dr. Faustus and Tamburlaine. During the 1590s, the Lord Admirals Men turned out new plays every fortnight, plays written by their stable of writers: Christopher Marlowe early on and, later, a bold and prolific group of playwrights unofficially known as Henslowes Hacks.
According to theatrical legend, Shakes-peare and Burbage often drank at a pub called the Boars Head, on Eastcheap Street, with Ben Jonson and writers from the Lord Admirals Men on their way over London Bridge to the theaters in South-wark. The pub burned down in Londons Great Fire of 1668. The Boars Head finds its way into literary history as Falstaffs headquarters in Henry IV.
Tom Stoppards screenplay for the film Shakespeare in Love gives a vivid sense of the intimacy of this world of rival theatrical troupes. We know there was a great deal of collaboration between Elizabethan playwrights, since the acting companies demanded new plays so quickly. Shakes-peare collaborated on plays throughout his career, although not as often as other playwrights did. New styles of plays came into vogue and were knocked off and widely imitated, stolen, and published without permission by rival troupes. The Admirals The Downfall of Robin Hood occasioned the Chamberlains As You Like It, as forest outlaw plays held sway for a time. The Chron-icle Play, retelling an episode of English history, was a perennial favorite, and the writers attached to each company churned out their own versions. Curiouslywhatever the genrenone of these Elizabethan playwrights sought to write work that was what today would be called original. Almost all their plays were taken and adapted from other sources, sometimes in an almost wholesale manner. A favorite source of English Chronicle plays was Raphael Holinsheds Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. This is Shakespeares primary source for the main plot of Henry IV, as well as for his other English-history plays. In sections of Shakespeares Henry V, whole passages are lifted from Holingshed and simply set in iambic pentameter. For Henry IV, Shakespeare found his Falstaff character and plot in the anonymously written Chronicle Play The Famous Victories of Henry Fifth, in which the Falstaff character is named Sir John OldCastle. In both parts of Henry IV, which Shakespeare wrote in quick succession in 1597 and 1598, Falstaff was an immediate sensation on the stage. Queen Elizabeth reportedly requested a play from the Lord Chamberlains Men in which she could see Falstaff in love, so Shakespeare obliged her by writing The Merry Wives of Windsor. And the eminent Shakespearean scholar Dover Wilson speculates that Shakespeare planned to include Falstaff in Henry V: The epilogue in Henry IV, Part II, says, Our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France. But the departure of his fellow player Will Kempe from the Lord Chamberlains Men left Shakespeare without a Falstaff, and so in Henry V we only hear of Falstaffs death offstage. We do know that within six months four of Henslowes Hacks, working together had knocked out The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie of the Life of Sir John Old-Castle, and The Second Part of Sir John Oldcastle, with His Martyrdom. Both opened at the Rose in the fall of 1599, and the first was printed in the next year with the name of Shakespeare on the title, a circumstance due to the confusion between Falstaff and Oldcastle
which an enterprising publisher would be loath to disabuse the public mind, observes Felix Schelling in The English Chronicle Play.
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