So many people have complained about the unpleasant way they were introduced to Shakespeare back when they were in school, perhaps a few words about what works might be in order as we leave the summer for another year of school or other communal activities.

The best way to create understanding for Shakespeare is for the class or group to read one of the plays out loud, each taking a part in rotation, scene by scene.  Sitting in a circle, in chairs or at student desks or around a cafeteria or library table, or even on the floor, everyone must have their own copy.  They don’t all have to be from the same edition, each can bring his or her own from home.

It begins with the teacher or leader giving a quick sketch of the plot and the characters; if some already know the play, they can contribute their knowledge and ideas.  The person to the right of the teacher/leader begins with the first scene of the first act, taking the part of the first character to speak.  The person to their right takes the part of the next to speak, and so on.  If the scene has only three people in it, which many do, then only three people will read that scene.  When the scene changes, the first person who has not yet spoken to the right of the last of those who have taken that scene, will takes the first part in Scene 2, and so forth, around the circle.

The mechanism that propels this foray into drama is the fact that everyone gets to read, and the most important factor is that, at every scene break, the parts pass to the right, so that if Joe plays Hamlet in the first scene in Act III, when the scene changes, he will have to wait until the parts work their way around to him to read again, this time most likely a different character, which he will read for that whole scene.   More than how much each gets  to speak, this brings the sensation of being part of the action of that scene, for you feel that as others speak, you are involved.  This pays no attention to type casting; a boy or man may take the part of Cleopatra while a girl or woman can read Brutus or Mark Antony.

This process is not perfectly equal to all members, but it’s a lot more evenly distributed than assigning parts so that one person reads that part all the way through while others get little or nothing.  If the play takes two or three sessions to read all the way through, then everyone in the group should have as full an experience as any other.  A group can be any size from three to thirty, although the more people there are the less each will get to read.  Perhaps the ideal group is somewhere between ten and fifteen.  If your class or group exceeds that by much, it might be better to split into two or more groups.  In this case each group can work on a different play.

In this way, everyone in the group gets the opportunity to read the lead character; if the play is Hamlet, usually at some point, everyone will have gotten to read his part, as he has more lines than anyone else.  In this way the characters, even the least of them, become real to the readers.  In this way, the story comes across through dialogue and the unselfconscious dramatizing that occurs naturally once the group gets caught up with the story, and without having to know exactly what each word means.  For although the language is very beautiful, and spiced with famous quotations, because of the great differences between Shakespeare’s language and ours today, it’s not all that easy to understand through reading alone.  Through this experience of group reading the language almost becomes secondary, as the action of the story conveys more to the reader than a dictionary ever could.

As I’ve expressed elsewhere, I believe that Shakespeare’s greatest gift wasn’t his language or his poetry––marvelous though they be––it’s the stories themselves that have made them classics in all languages, that have inspired symphonies, operas and ballets.   Story is the greatest medium of learning.  Like a game or a sport, or an  experiment in chemistry, drama takes silent, quiescent objects in the form of characters, setting them in motion with and against each other, revealing through their interactions their values and motivations, which, without the action of story, would remain hidden, all leading to a climax that, in the case of a great masterpiece, can bring each viewer or reader the kind of awareness normally gained only from personal experience.

Like a song, a dance, or a game, a play is not a thing, it’s a process.  The pleasure it brings comes through action in time, like watching a flower unfold, a toddler take her first steps, or a tired veteran hit a line drive in the nineth inning.  There’s drama in everything, most of it hidden, buried in “getting and spending,” but in a great play revealed, line by line, scene by scene, until the curtain comes down.

In Shakespeare’s day the theater was cheap, and everyone, in London at least, could see a play once a week, during the season, if they cared to.  Now of course it’s risen, or sunk, to a level where only the wealthy can afford to see more than one or two professional plays a season, and there’s no guarantee if the experience will be worth the price.  In the twentieth century, movies took the place of the stage as the entertainment of the masses.  Midway through the century, television caused the movies too to lose their place in our lives, so that it’s not only live drama that, for most of us, has lost its place as a communal event, what’s been most grieviously lost is the feeling we got from sitting for two hours in a darkened theater as part of an audience of substantial size, all sharing the same emotional experience.

It’s something of an irony, that the Theater, having replaced the Church as the center of  communal life in the sixteenth century, now seems to be filling the theatrical void with the rise across America of the huge modern evangelical churches with their “Christian” entertainment in which, once again,  swaying and clapping, huge audiences hear sin condemned and the wicked consigned to a twelfth-century fiery furnace.

For those who find no solace in swaying and clapping and grieving over sin , getting together in reading groups to experience Shakespeare in much the same way that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men must have done when first provided with something like Romeo and Juliet, may actually be more rewarding in some ways than just sitting passively in a theater, letting the actors do all the work.  And certainly less expensive.

 The face of Richard III, modeled by a computer scientist by means of the skull  found in a recent archeological dig in Leicestershire, provides evidence of Richard’s abuse by Shakespeare and the Tudor historians.

The discovery of the skeleton of Richard III last year has aroused new interest in the last of the Plantagenet kings.  While every English school child knows (I hope) that his death was a major turning point in English history, ushering in the Tudor era, and in literature the Early Modern period, no one seems to be aware that the story of his death was a turning point in the history of the London Stage as well.  And for authorship scholars and those concerned with the question of the identity of Shakespeare, it was also when his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, were forced to come up with a name for their playwright.

Richard and the Tudor historians

As the final episode in the cycle of history plays that tell the stories of England’s kings, Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard III is an anomaly.  Where he used his great talents to humanize  monarchs like Richard II and Henry IV, that he chose to demonize one of the more sympathetic kings can only be seen as a political necessity for a company that, if it was to remain in business, had to conform to the Tudor’s version of history.  Richard III was the king whose throne they stole, and so he had to be portrayed as a villain––that’s all there was to it.

As explained by Alfred Hart, back in 1536, Henry VIII, frightened by the  grassroots uprising historians call the Pilgrimage of Grace, reacted by devising a new law to be expounded at regular intervals from the Pulpit, a law that held that any hint of rebellion against an annointed monarch was henceforth to be considered sedition compounded with heresy.  A crime as well as a sin, it would be punished by burning in this life and in the hotter levels of hell in the next (Homilies).

While this attitude forced Tudor historians to vilify the intelligent and competent Henry IV (aka Bolingbroke) as a wicked usurper, an unintended consequence was the fact that what Henry’s own father (Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather) did to Richard III was basically no different than what Henry IV (of Lancaster, Bolingbroke) had done to Richard II.  The only moral recourse for the Tudor historians was to paint Henry Tudor (Henry VII) as another St. George or Beowulf, whose honor it was to rid the world of a monster.  Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, provided the necessary hate-bio, and later historians simply followed suit.

Therefore, while the earliest chronicles noted that Richard had a crooked back (as the skeleton confirms) and a raised shoulder, it’s the Tudor historians who swelled the shoulder into a hump, a fixture for actors playing Shakespeare’s evil king.  It was Tudor historians who added the withered arm and the full set of teeth that he was supposedly born with.  As for the accusations of any number of murders and evil intentions, none of it derived from the earlier chronicles.  It seems the only thing for which they blamed Richard in his own time was his supposed ambition for the throne and the disappearance of his brother’s sons, the little princes in the Tower, and even that has an aura of uncertainty about it.  There were an awful lot of descendants of Edward III with their eyes on the throne at that time, and it’s not at all clear, not at least until his brother died (of illness, not murder), that Richard was one of them.

Shakespeare exaggerated Richard’s crimes, rearranging events to make him responsible for more murders than even More and followers had assigned him.  But why exaggerate his deformities?  Picked up from one detractor or another, Shakespeare not only amplified them, he has Richard himself explain right off at the beginning of the first act how his hideous appearance is the cause of his evil nature.  Since everyone dislikes him anyway, he might as well aim for the throne where he’ll be safe from his enemies, free to commit whatever crimes may be necessary along the way.

Clearly Shakespeare’s Richard was what today we’d call a sociopath.  In addition to his scary looks and overweening ambition, Shakespeare follows More by harping on Richard’s hypocrisy, his “devilish craft.”  As G.B. Churchill puts it, if others portrayed Richard as “a deep dissimuler, . . . More’s account seems one continued attempt to prove that thesis” (124).  Shakespeare, going More one better, makes it the entire theme of the play, as Richard cons one fool after another into trusting him.

Shakespeare’s Richard and the academics

Richard III has always been immensely popular with audiences.  It has never, however, been popular with critics, who find it crude, unpoetic, and so unShakespearean that attempts have been made to palm it off on Christopher Marlowe.  In his Introduction to an edition meant to deal with the plays “in their literary aspect, and not merely as material for the study of philology or grammar,” Arden editor Hazelton Spencer reveals the standard attitude of the critic towards Shakespeare’s Richard III:

Little can be said for this play as a piece of imaginative literature; . . .   Perhaps the best reason for studying it lies in the strange contrasts between its poverty in poetry, ideas, and psychology, and its effectiveness as theatre; and between its melodramatic crudeness and the sublimity of Shakespeare’s later tragedies (v).

Spencer notes that both Samuel Johnson and Edmond Malone had commented on the discrepancy between its “literary merits”––that is, their lack––and “its popularity on the stage.”  He can’t understand how the poet who wrote Richard II could have written Richard III: “its clumsy structure, its overobvious characterization, and the inferior quality of its verse . . . .” (xxii).   He extolls “the gorgeous and exalting sweep of the poetry” of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, but Richard the Third “is not a masterpiece” (xiii-iv), and he doubts that it will ever be performed frequently again (xv).

History vs Literature

Spencer was writing in 1933, long before Laurence Olivier popularized Shakespeare’s Richard in the 1940s and ’50s.  He was also writing before Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Spain’s Franco, Romania’s Ceausescu, and assorted African tyrants gave Shakespeare’s “unpoetic” play a relevance it has continued to have ever since.  But then the so-called literary critics have never had much of an appetite for real history.  Assuming that Shakespeare was simply taking advantage of Richard’s bad reputation to please the more bloodthirsty elements in his public audience, they ignore what mainstream history could have told them long before authorship scholars like myself were forced to turn to it for answers unobtainable from the archives.

In comparing the date of the play’s registration, October 20, 1597, with events surrounding it, we are forced to admit, like it or not, that the traits emphasized by Shakespeare in his portrait of Richard III were the very same which all were aware were those of the recently-appointed Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil.  When we add to this the situation Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, were in at that moment in time, we find more than enough evidence to see the play as a political weapon in a battle that either never reached the archives, or if it did, was later expunged.  And when we realize that this was the very moment in time that upwards of 500 well-educated and intelligent men from all over England, readers and playgoers, were gathered in London’s West End for one of the the Queen’s rare parliaments, we may begin to comprehend just what this moment meant to Shakespeare, his actors, the history of the Crown, and the tremendous power of the newborn Fourth Estate.

Robert Cecil aka the Earl of Salisbury

Half the height of most of the young men at Court, his back twisted and head thrust forward by the scoliosis inherited from his mother’s side of the family, Cecil was, if not exactly hideous, certainly out of place at a Court that idealized male beauty (several of Elizabeth’s most important officials got their start when she noticed their  long legs encased in silken hose, snug little pants, and short  bejeweled jackets).  The one trait that it seems Shakespeare added to those More described (I’ve not seen it mentioned in any of the early literature), Richard’s limp reflects Robert Cecil’s awkward gait, caused by his spindly little legs and splay feet.  But while these defects may have been the source of much cruel humor, Cecil was disliked most of all because, as Lord Burghley’s son and heir, he was rapidly promoted while worthy candidates like Francis Bacon and Robert Sidney were consistently denied Court office.  Having faced this reaction since birth, Robert, like Shakespeare’s Richard, was skilled in hiding his feelings and motives, pretending, when it was to his benefit, friendship with men he feared and envied and would later destroy.

Raised by a father who had been Secretary of State throughout his childhood, by age twenty-seven Cecil was well-prepared to take over when Secretary Walsingham died in 1590.  He began by sharing the duties of the office with his father, but increasingly, as he continued to prove himself, Burghley, old and tired, let his son take over.  This was to be a temporary solution until the Queen decided who should be Secretary, but after six years of stalling, she relented and in July of 1596, while his most powerful enemies, the Earl of Essex and his supporters, were away at the conquest of Cadiz, she made it official.  If this was bad news for Essex, it was terrible news for the London Stage.

The Cecils vs the Media

Lack of documentation on Walsingham’s role in establishing the London Media in the 1580s has left the historians confused about the chaos into which his death in 1590 threw the Stage and the Press.  Towards the end of the ’80s, both had begun to demonstrate what to the conservatives on the Privy Council was an alarming and dangerous independence.  In 1587 Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn broke from Burbage’s team to produce a new sort of play at the newly built Rose Theater on Bankside.  While Tamburlaine thrilled the apprentices and journeymen of Southwark, proving to the theater community that with the right play they could see for the first time that acting might actually become a viable means of earning a living; to the Cecils it must have seemed a dangerous rabble-rouser, one that violated their primary rule for the London Stage, thou shalt not portray the successful overthrow of an “anointed” monarch!  This was soon followed by the scurrilous pamphlets of the anonymous Martin Mar-Prelate, whose witty thrusts at the Anglican bishops were selling like hotcakes.

From the birth of the London Stage in 1576 until Walsingham’s death in 1590, agents of the Crown, supposedly acting in the Queen’s interest, generally worked to protect the Stage from the anxieties of the City mayors and aldermen who were determined to get rid of it.  But now it seems, some agency of the central government had joined the City in its determination to destroy the Stage.  English history, for reasons that will appear, hesitates to attribute this to Robert Cecil’s takeover of Walsingham’s team of operatives, but since there was no other major change at the top level of government at that time, we must look to the dates of events for evidence of the truth.

Events and dates

1590 to ’91 saw the departure from the record of both companies that had been the most consistent entertainers at Court for the previous decade, Paul’s Boys and the Queen’s Men.  Critics find reasons for these, but the most arresting fact is that they both disappeared from the Revels records shortly after Cecil took Walsingham’s place.  This was followed early in 1592 by an attempt by former Walsingham agents to arrest Marlowe on a trumped-up charge of counterfeiting.  This failed, but in May of 1593, with the streets of London empty due to plague, the same agents nailed him in a supposed brawl in a hostel in Deptford, the same day that other government agents hanged, in an out-of-the-way innyard on the road to Deptford, the man who, years earlier, had printed the Mar-prelate satires.

Chaos ensued, and in the shuffle of actors, patrons and publishers that followed Marlowe’s demise, Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, a minor player on the Court Stage until then, took over as patron of what had been Marlowe’s company while Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon, the old veteran of the Scottish border wars whose job it now was to oversee Court entertainment, worked to create a setup that would satisfy the the Queen, the Privy Council, the City Fathers, and the actors.  In June of 1594, as this arrangement headed for completion, Lord Strange was murdered, his death attributed variously to witchcraft, poison, Catholics, or all three (modern forensics suggest that he was poisoned with a single massive dose of arsenic).  His place as patron of the Southwark company was taken by Hunsdon’s son-in-law, Lord Admiral Charles Howard.

Events of 1596

With their public theater in Shoreditch in trouble with the landlord and in desperate need of repair, in February 1596, James Burbage, with Hunsdon’s help, purchased the old Parliament Chamber at Blackfriars and began renovations in preparation for the next round of winter holidays.  The following July, while Essex and his supporters were out of the country on their Cadiz adventure, the Queen finally appointed Robert Cecil Secretary of State.  Two weeks later, on July 23, Hunsdon was dead, and two weeks after that, his office of Lord Chamberlain was passed on to Robert Cecil’s father-in-law, William Brooke, Lord Cobham.  Astrologers note that the Queen’s 63rd birthday in September ushered in what they called her “climacteric,” considered to be a particularly dangerous year, something that everyone would have been aware of, since Astrology was still considered a science.  That November, 33 residents of Blackfriars, including Cecil’s aunt Lady Russell, signed a petition requesting that the Privy Council prohibit the opening of Burbage’s new theater: the noise, the traffic, etc..  The Council, now dominated by two Cecils and Lord Chamberlain Brooke, granted the request.  The Company retaliated by inserting into several of their plays a fat knight of questionable character they named Sir John Oldcastle after Brooke’s historic, and to him, sacred ancestor.  At the Queen’s request, the name was changed to Falstaff.

Events of 1597

Following what must have been a rough winter holiday for his actors, James Burbage died the following February, leaving his sons Richard and Cuthbert a company without a home.  The lease for the Shoreditch stage would be up in May, and their expensive new indoor theater remained shuttered by government command.  The following month, the Company got a break when the aging William Brooke died and in April, the office of Lord Chamberlain was finally given to Hunsdon’s heir, George Carey.  But Carey, it seems, was no match for the Cecils.  (He died six years later, shortly after the Queen.)

Then in June, a new company calling itself Pembroke’s Men began performing at a new theater, the Swan, on Bankside, in something titled The Isle of Dogs.  Nothing of its content has survived, all we know is that it caused Cecil to jail the authors and order the Swan closed down, along with all the other theaters in London. (The real Isle of Dogs, a hangout for fugitives from the law, lay directly across the river from Deptford Strand where three years earlier Christopher Marlowe had had his quietus made with a bare bodkin.)  Thus, along with all the other London theater companies, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were forced to take to the road in August.

Returning to London in September, now without a performance stage, on October 20 the Company registered The Tragedy of Richard the Third with the Stationers, publishing it (and an early quarto of Richard II) before the end of the year.  The record shows that they were the only company to perform at Court over the winter holidays that year, (unfortunately the names of the six plays they performed were not recorded).   As for their public audience, although they had no public stage at their disposal, they must  have found somewhere inside Westminster to perform, since it was Richard Burbage’s performance as the King that first made him famous.

Events of 1598

The 1597 edition of Richard III was anonymous, as was that of Richard II and all the other Shakespeare plays and early quartos published from 1591 on.  But at some point in 1598, a second edition was published, different only in that, for the first time, the title page bore the name: William Shake-speare.  A second edition of Richard II was published at the same time, with the same name on the title page, also hyphenated.  And at some point that year was published the literary bauble, Wit’s Treasury, supposedly by the otherwise unremarkable Francis Meres, in which “William Shakespeare” was given credit for these and ten more currently popular plays.  Thus, after four years of anonymity (more likely, two decades), was the author of the Shakespeare canon finally given a name.  Why then?  And why not until then?

The Queen’s Ninth Parliament

The Queen did not enjoy having to call parliament together because invariably, despite being ordered not to do so, the House of Commons would raise the question of the Succession, demanding that she marry and provide an heir, something she hated to think about, much less discuss with a gaggle of wrangling parliamentarians.  Nevertheless, having run short of operating funds, by the fall of 1597 she was forced to call another parliament into session, her ninth in 38 years.

So every three or four years men from all over England, important men, men of standing in their communities, would gather together in the West End to do business both for the Crown and with each other.  More often than not, this routine took place in the fall, the MPs discussing business from October to December, taking a break over the Christmas holidays. and reconvening in January to dissolve sometime before the beginning of Lent.  All the important figures in this story took part.  Playing important roles were Robert Cecil, Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, and in the Lords, the Bishops, the Earl of Essex and other members of the Privy Council.

It shouldn’t take any great stretch of the imagination to see how important these gatherings would have been to the theater companies and commercial publishers, when for three or four months every three or four years, the most intelligent and affluent audience in London would suddenly expand to include upwards of 500 of the nation’s most important men of affairs, all eager to see the latest plays, read the latest publications, and discuss them with each other.  Nor should it require a great leap of awareness to see how important it would be to the Crown company, when the primary policy-makers from all over England were gathered together in one place, to have an indoor theater within walking distance of the Inns of Court where these gentlemen had rooms.

Nor should it take a genius to see how important it would have been for Robert Cecil, facing his first parliament as the Queen’s representative, to prevent the possibility, perhaps the known fact, that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were primed to attack him for the damages wreaked on them and their community over the past seven years.  For whatever the truth, the Company could hardly have seen the list of events that hurt them in any other light, from the murder of Marlowe to the murder of his patron Lord Strange, from the sudden death of their patron Lord Hunsdon to the death of their manager (and father) James Burbage, to the loss of their theaters, even perhaps the somewhat mysterious death of Secretary Walsingham, the first of so many disasters, all seemingly ushered in by the insertion of Robert Cecil into the machinery of government.

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men had their backs to the wall and they were not at all confused about who to blame.  Gone were the elders who over the past ten years had the power to hold their energies in check in times of trial; now there was no one left to counsel them to be patient and wait for the pendulum to swing their way.  What leaders were left to them at this time would have been John Hemmings, soon to be manager of the Company, the Burbage brothers, and of course, the one who is so often left out by the academics in their fantasies about how plays get written and produced, the playwright!  It must have been during those weeks on the road from July to September 1597 that the Burbages, Hemmings and Shakespeare discussed their options with the other members of the Company.

The result was Shakespeare’s Richard III with Richard Burbage as the lead, and probably Alexander Cooke, Hemming’s new protégé, as one or two of the female characters (unusually, there were four of these in Richard III).  By exaggerating Richard’s deformities and behavior to conform to those of Robert Cecil, Burbage, hunched over, dressed all in black, imitating the Secretary’s intonation and body language as he confided one evil plan after another to the audience, conveyed the message, through the MPs to the entire nation that the newly-appointed Secretary of State was the reincarnation of Richard the Third.

There can be no question but that this is the background to the creation of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the reason why he didn’t bother with poetic language or appealing characters, possibly even avoiding them, why everything went into making the play as dark and Richard as evil as possible.  Thus the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, faced with destruction, hurled the bombshell that saved their company.  Fired to full blast by circumstance, compounded of Shakespeare’s pen and Burbage’s acting, we know how effective was the pen; we can only imagine what the performance was like.

The evidence

Questions remain of course.  Denied their theater during the Ninth Parliament, where might the Company have performed?  One possibility was the hall at Essex House, located in the heart of the West End.  Essex had renovated what was once his step-father’s mansion, enlarging the hall to immense proportions.  From October through December 1597, Essex was once again deep in the despairing funk that overcame him from time to time.  Furious with the Queen who he believed had insulted him by promoting the Lord Admiral above him, he was refusing to participate either in parliament or on the Privy Council.  However, if not at Essex House, there were other halls in the mansions along the Strand.

As for how the published version got past the censors, remember that, as written, Shakespeare’s play makes no obvious connection to Cecil; if it had it wouldn’t have taken 400 plus years to discover it.  The months when London was filled with parliamentarians would have been crowded with activity and immensely busy for everyone, so that getting things past authority might have been easier than usual.  That Francis Bacon was involved in getting both Richard II and Richard III published seems obvious from the fact that his mysterious Northumberland manuscript folder has both their titles plus the name William Shakespeare scribbled on the cover.

For the Elizabethans the connection of Richard III to Robert Cecil was made by Burbage’s performance, passing like wildfire from shire to shire by word of mouth.  Today the connection can be made by the torrent of verse libels that appeared following Cecil’s death in 1612.  In a 2006 article in The Shakespeare Bulletin, English Professor M.G. Aune quotes articles from the 1990s by English historians that clearly show that this was Shakespeare’s intent.  Says Aune, historians “Margaret Hotine and Pauline Croft have traced a number of these connections using verse libels about Cecil and the printing history of the quarto of Richard III.” Among the constantly repeated images of toads and spiders, so prominent in Shakespeare’s play, some were even more direct, as in:

Here lieth Robin Crookt back, unjustly reckoned
A Richard the Third, he was Judas the Second.
In their lives they agree, in their deaths somewhat alter,
The more pity the pox so cozened the halter [tricked the hangman].
Richard, or Robert, which is the worse?
A Crookt back great in state is England’s curse.

Libels against him had appeared early in Cecil’s career, but they do not exceed in number or nature the norm for unpopular public figures.  However, immediately following his death in 1612, verse libels of the most scurrious nature began pouring forth in a volume and with a force noted by every scholar who has examined Cecil’s career all the way to the end.  Based on the number that survive out of those written down at the time (these online are a mere 25 out of the scores that remain in the archives), we can only conjecture what must have been their actual volume, for what differentiates a jingle from all other forms of literary endeavor is that, by their very nature, they are so easy to remember that the only reason for writing them down would have been to include them in a letter or a diary.

The stalemate

In the end both sides won and both lost.  Robert Cecil was already too firmly fixed in power to be removed.  Despite his loss of reputation, he continued to play what cards he had until the fall of Essex took down a whole tier of his lesser enemies.  Having masterminded the accession of James of Scotland, and been rewarded with every possible title and office, he became impervious to everything but the tumor that we’re told was what killed him in 1612.  As for the play, and its series of editions, the only thing he could do about that was ignore it.  It was, after all, just a play, which  from his lofty perch he was entitled to dismiss as unworthy of notice.  He was, after all, well used to being called names.

Shakespeare, first named as author of Richard III and so many other plays, continued to supply his Company, now the King’s Men, with new plays and revisions.  And although the Company itself, even as they were adopted by King James as his own, continued to produce plays without let or hindrance for both the Court and the London Stage, they were still denied the use of the great Blackfriars stage.  Having dismantled the old Shoreditch Theatre and reassembled it in Southwark early in 1599 as The Globe, they were no longer without a big outdoor stage, but when their Blackfriars stage reopened in 1599 or 1600, it was as a venue for another company of boys, the “little eyases” of Hamlet’s complaint.  Not until 1609 would it become available once again to the Burbages and the King’s Men.  From then on, given its  size and ideal location, it was a major element in the many years of financial success under King James.

In the long run it may actually be Robert Cecil who had the last laugh.  As everyone knows who has researched this period, the record invariably dries up where one might expect some reference to the London Stage or the University Wits.  Historians generally attribute this to the exigencies of time, or the laziness of clerks.  But the gaps are too pronounced, they appear too often and are too specific to this subject to dismiss.  The history of Elizabeth’s reign was and still is based primarily on documents collected by the Cecils during their time as Secretaries of State.  From 1559, when William first took that office under Elizabeth, to 1612 when Robert Cecil died, there was only one period when they did not control the paper house: the 13 years from 1577 to 1590 that Sir Francis Walsingham was Secretary of State.  As everyone knows who has tried to write a history of that time, this period is something of a blank since Walsingham’s personal papers disappeared immediately after his death.

Only two persons were in a position to have taken Walsingham’s papers, Essex, who married his daughter shortly after his death, or Robert Cecil, who took over his office at Whitehall immediately.  Even if Essex did get them, or some of them, Cecil would have ended up with them anyway since, following Essex’s execution, his papers came into Cecil’s possession.  Those that remain still form an important part of the Hatfield House collection.  Not only did Cecil inherit his father’s papers, as Secretary of State he had access to every office of government, and as Chancellor of Cambridge University, to its records as well.  If the Secretary wished to examine a particular set of books, who would dare to say him nay?  As Shakespeare scholar Andrew Gurr tells us, “not a single Privy Council document has survived from the period between 27 August 1593 and 1 October 1595” (Peculiar Letter, 55).

Nevertheless, that this scenario is the truth, or close to it, can be seen by several things.  Richard III is unique for the number of editions published in quarto, six by 1623 when it was included in the First Folio.  As Margaret Hotine has demonstrated, as though to remind the public who they were dealing with, these were printed and sold every time Cecil/Salisbury was given another office, stole another piece of common land, or was given another title.  There was no way Cecil could do anything about this.  To have moved against the publishing community would have been to admit that Shakespeare was right.

Perhaps the most basic question about the war between the Cecils and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men has to be how it was that while their manager and their patron died, their playwright survived.  Obviously Cecil understood that to stop what had begun happening at the Rose back in the late 1580s he had to eliminate the problem at its source: the playwright Christopher Marlowe.  How was it then that Shakespeare, according to the academics a provincial much like Marlowe, and with no known connection to the Court, managed to survive to write the damning Richard III, and to then republish it again and again over the years, each time tweaking the grammar and syntax as only its author would bother to do?

Why was it that after entertaining Londoners for years, it was not until 1598 that the second editions of Richard II and Richard III, with the help of the gossipy Wit’s Treasury, provided audiences and readers with an official author?  It seems clear that the Company had had William of Stratford waiting in the wings since almost their very inception, yet they continued to publish without an author’s name for years until forced to make use of it in 1598.  As spelled on the title pages in 1598, the hyphen would have made it clear to the majority of readers (though not to today’s see-no-evil academics) that this was a pun-name––like Martin Mar-prelate––the traditional signal that the author was as fictional as his book.  No big deal; London’s small  community of readers were used to such ploys.  When it came to Richard III, where the material in question was political dynamite, anyone who dared to pursue the matter further would find, sooner or later, a real individual, one who refused to demonstrate his writing because “his hand hurt.”  Whatever William of Stratford’s ignorance of writing, he was truly a genius at keeping a secret.

Had William of Stratford actually been the author, he would soon have gone the way of Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe.  Because the actual author was a permanent member of the Court, second highest in rank (far outranking either of the Cecils, Essex, Raleigh, Sidney, Southampton, even men like Lord Hunsdon––even, if geneology be applied, the Queen herself; because he was for many years one of her favorites; because, once she allowed him back at Court following his criminal impregnation of her virginal attendant, she never again allowed him too far out of her sight; because having married William Cecil’s daughter, Robert Cecil’s sister, he was henceforth a member of the Cecil family, their stepping stone into the upper ranks of the peerage––for these and other reasons, unlike Marlowe and Lord Strange, the Earl of Oxford could not be killed.  He may well have feared for his life in the mid-90s, but the real battle from then on was over his papers, as is suggested by Cecil’s arrest of Southampton when news reached him in June of 1604 that Oxford was dead.

This fight was not only Shakespeare against Cecil, it was the oldest fight in the world, it was Jacob against Esau, Set against Osiris, Loki against Baldur the Good.  Oxford had been part of the Cecil household when Robert was born in June 1563, puny and ailing, not expected to live.  He had watched him grow, just as later Robert watched as Oxford turned his back on his father and his sister.  Cecil hated Oxford, just as he hated Raleigh and all the  handsome, talented men of rank or favor who looked down on him and his family.   He could not touch him, but he could destroy his creation, the London Stage, and that other creation that Oxford shared with his cousin Bacon, the commercial press.  Understanding Robert, without Hunsdon to protest or anyone to stop him, Oxford created a monster for the Queen’s ninth parliament that saved his beloved company, and although it didn’t stop Cecil from further depredations, he and his men managed to survive until taken under the protection of the King’s favorites, the young Earl of Pembroke and his brother.

On the other hand, however damaging was Oxford’s spear-shaking to Cecil’s reputation, it was Cecil who, over time, has actually triumphed ever since, for by having control of the record, he was able to eliminate his brother-in-law’s connection to the London Stage, the commercial press, and cruelest of all, to the Shakespeare canon, the most beautiful creation in all of English Literature.