In Sonnets 110–112 Shakespeare appears to comment on his own professional career as an actor. The speaker confesses, as if in response to someone’s reproach against him, that
Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view . . . .
(Sonnet 110)
The word “motley” suggests the long multi-coloured gown worn by a fool on a public stage or in a noble household, and also the variety of costumes and characters assumed by a versatile professional player. In the first sense, the speaker has played the fool, while the second sense recalls the celebrated attack on Shakespeare in 1592, as “an absolute Johannes factotum”, a man who believes he can play all parts and write all parts, on stage and off.
These sonnets may include a response to this early fracas, but there seem also to be recent troubles involving compromised status. The sonnet-speaker’s confession – “Alas, ’tis true” – acknowledges that promiscuous self-display as a “motley” player is socially contaminating. But in the next sonnet he makes an excuse, imploring his interlocutor to blame the goddess Fortune for his many crimes of self-exposure. It was she who “did not better for my life provide”. Fortune failed to ensure that the speaker’s “life”, or livelihood, equipped him for a more respectable profession, so that he found no better means of survival “Than public means, which public manner breeds” (Sonnet 111). In Sonnet 112 the speaker struggles to console himself with a hyperbolic claim that his friend’s “love and pity” is so precious to him that it fully outweighs public opinion, smoothing over the deep scar inflicted on his brow by “vulgar scandal”.
The sonnets cited fall within a larger group (104–26) which MacD. P. Jackson has assigned to the early Jacobean period, on the basis of rare-word links with Shakespeare’s plays. Three allusions by the writing master and poet John Davies of Hereford seem to refer to a disappointment suffered by Shakespeare soon after the accession of James I. They suggest that a career as a leading player on public stages prevented both him and his colleague and friend Richard Burbage from receiving promotion which, in Davies’s view, they fully merited. The first occurs in Microcosmos (1603), an encyclopedic poem describing and celebrating the little world of England for the benefit of the new King, within a larger discussion of Pride:
Players, I love yee, and your Qualitie,
As ye are Men, that pass time not abus’d:
And some I love for painting, poesie,
And say fell Fortune cannot be excus’d,
That hath for better uses you refus’d:
Wit, Courage, good shape, good partes, and all good,
As long as al these goods are no worse us’d,
And though the stage doth staine pure gentle bloud,
Yet generous yee are in minde and moode.
Davies uses the correct technical term, “quality” to describe the profession of acting. His own favourite players, identified in a marginal note as “W.S.” and “R.B.”, that is, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, are not celebrated for acting alone. Each has a further skill, in Burbage’s case painting, and in Shakespeare’s “poesie”, or literary composition. His next marginal note cites the aphorism of Simonides which links the arts of painting and poesy, further stressing the close relationship between two players of exceptional gifts who are also, offstage, masters of sister arts. In a line reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111 Davies blames “fell Fortune” for debarring both men from “better uses”. Both are gifted in mind, spirit and physique, and both, despite the stigma of “the stage”, are true gentlemen, the Latin word generosus, here anglicized as “generous”, being the legal term for a “gentleman”. (As Davies surely knew, both Shakespeare and Burbage were now armigerous. Shakespeare’s grant of arms had been awarded by Garter King of Arms, William Dethick in 1596. Burbage’s may have been obtained from one of the painter-stainers in the Strand who supplied coats of arms more cheaply than the Heralds, or he may have devised and painted it himself.) The marginal note on this line, in which Davies compares these players with the “honest” as well as talented Roman actor Roscius, recalls the praise Henry Chettle bestows on Shakespeare in Kind-harts Dream (1592), having recently learned of his “uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty”. Davies goes on to celebrate the didactic function of plays and players in ridiculing vice and upholding virtue, contrasting the deservedly high status of gifted stage-players such as W. S. and R. B. with the vacuous pretensions of minor musicians and “bag-pipers”.
A more glancing allusion occurs in Davies’s moral reflections on the 1603–4 outbreak of plague, entitled Humours heav’n on earth (1609). He discusses the impact of the vagaries of Fortune on the unworthy and the worthy. While some unworthy men are raised too high, only to be thrust down again, “Yet some she guerdond not, to their desarts”. A marginal note refers again to W. S. and R. B. Davies’s third allusion is to Shakespeare alone. His collection of epigrams The Scourge of Folly (1611) includes a laudatory poem addressed “To our English Terence Mr. Will. Shakespeare”:
Some say (good Will) which I, in sport, do sing
Had’st thou not plaid some kingly parts in sport
Thou had’st bin a companion for a King,
And, beene a King among the meaner sort.
Some other raile, but, raile as they thinke fit,
Thou hast no railing, but, a raigning Wit:
And honesty thou sow’st, which they do reape;
So, to increase their Stocke which they do keepe.
This epigram falls within a group of epigrams praising men Davies admires, including his friends Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson (Epigrams 155, 156), Inigo Jones, “our English Zeuxis and Vitruvius” (157), and his “right-well-deserving friend Mr. John Speed” (175). Though Shakespeare is not explicitly addressed as a “friend”, the word “our”, combined with the familiar “good Will”, suggests that he may have been Davies’s personal acquaintance as well as a national treasure.
Davies’s epigram has not been much discussed by Shakespeare’s biographers. Yet again, he suggests that Shakespeare has missed advancement because of his profession of player. As leading member, along with Burbage, of the King’s Men, he was already in a minor way a “companion for a king”. It was as “his Majesties Groomes of the Chamber and Players” that Shakespeare, Burbage and their fellow King’s Men were paid for eighteen days of attendance on the Spanish peace delegates in August 1604. But for the stigma of the stage, it seems, Shakespeare might have been drawn yet deeper into the centre of the Court. In lines 5–6 Davies contrasts Shakespeare’s “wit” with that of contemporary writers who “rail” wittily, but fall short of Shakespeare’s quasi-royal pre-eminence. He is perhaps thinking of such satirical playwrights as Jonson, Marston and Dekker. His closing couplet is particularly telling. “Honesty” is a plant whose seed-pods look like coins. Shakespeare’s “honesty” is such that he scatters his superabundant wit freely for others, such as the “railing” writers, to gather and appropriate as their own.
What was the advancement that Shakespeare missed? An answer may be suggested by two other early Jacobean texts. At the end of May 1605, Valentine Simmes printed the second of two pamphlets about the confidence trickster Gamaliel Ratsey. Though many anecdotes are clearly fictional, Ratsey was a historical person, a young gentleman from Market Deeping, in Lincolnshire, who turned to the bad when he came back to England from military service in Ireland. After a crime spree lasting about eighteen months he was convicted of highway robbery and was publicly hanged in Bedford on March 25, 1605. The first exploit described in Ratseis Ghost is “A pretty prancke passed by Ratsey, upon certaine Players that he met by chance in an Inne”. Ratsey treated these players lavishly, paying them the high city rate of forty shillings for a special private performance at the inn, only to catch up with them on the road a few days later. Here he extracted all their money from them with violent menaces – not just his own forty shillings, but the company’s entire savings.
The chief point of this episode seems to be not so much to itemize Ratsey’s villainies as to comment on the current state of acting in England. While some good performers are poorly rewarded,
Others there are whom Fortune hath so wel favored, that what by penny-sparing and long practice of playing, are growne so wealthy, that they have expected to be knighted, or at least to be conjunct in authority, and to sit with men of great worship, on the Bench of Justice.
After Ratsey has taken away all their money he pretends that he will take the company under his own patronage. He singles out their chief player in order to give him satirical advice:
Get thee to London, for if one man were dead, they will have much need of such a one as thou art . . . my conceipt is such of thee, that I durst venture all the mony in my purse on thy head, to play Hamlet with him for a wager . . . and when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place or Lordship in the Country, that growing weary of playing, thy mony may there bring thee to dignitie and reputation.
