they could rely on a new audience in the next town or great house. In London, there was a pressing need to get the playgoers back for more. The new public theaters needed more plays, more playwrights: a perfect recipe for the young actor, and aspiring playwright, William Shakespeare. He was not alone, of course: “As the commercial theatre expanded, many young men, primed with a command of rhetoric thanks to their training in the new grammar schools, made their way to the capital. Under-employed and highly literate, they were soon called upon to produce copy for the players, who (with large venues and longer periods of residence) were turning over material at an unprecedented rate” (Van Es 2013, p. 1). It was an era of unprecedented opportunity for an actor-playwright. The new playhouses (when they were permitted to open) needed new material, far more than had been required when companies only went on the road: “itinerant acting companies could succeed by repeating in different places a small inventory of plays” (Bednarz 2018, p. 22). Those “with an established urban-based clientele were, instead, compelled to acquire larger and more differentiated repertoires – including diverse and innovative comedies – in order to satisfy the expectations of inveterate theatre-goers who could choose among competing venues” (Bednarz 2018, p. 22).
In retrospect, we can see that William Shakespeare was in the right place, at the right time: London 1592. Whether his family, particularly his father, saw the situation in the same way is another question. Fred Tromly (2010, p. 251) speculates on John Shakespeare’s response to his son’s career choice, bearing in mind that no one knew just how lucrative the theater industry would be for his son. Believing that John saw William “rejecting the traditional forms of business in favour of an enterprise that, in addition to being morally questionable in the eyes of many, offered very little promise of stability and steady income,” he sees an unbridgeable generation gap opening between father and son. For Jonathan Bate that rejection of artisan business in Stratford was less calculated but no less significant. Refusing to speculate about the Shakespeare family’s Catholicism, Bate nevertheless asserts that “the balance of probability is that William Shakespeare’s own instinct and inheritance were cautious, traditional, respectable, suspicious of change. We may as well say conservative” (2008, p. 66). This all changed when William “got the acting bug.” For Bate, as with Tromly, John Shakespeare would not have been best pleased. Coming from a class where “idleness” was sin, he “would have subscribed to the common view that actors were little better than vagabonds […] When John heard that his son had become employed in the theatre, he would have been flabbergasted. The dramatic profession was a completely unknown quantity” (2008, pp. 73–74).
What no one could have imagined was William Shakespeare’s unlikely and swift rise from actor to jointsharer in a new acting company, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. But that is where he was headed.
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