The year was 1603 and a plucky band of actors appeared on the stage at the Globe theatre to perform Ben Jonson’s play, Sejanus, a tragedy about a Roman soldier. The performance was such a flop that the cast was hissed and heckled off stage. One member of that cast was William Shakespeare – and now an academic is making the case that this humiliating experience went on to affect the writing of one of the bard’s greatest plays, Othello.
Dr John-Mark Philo, an academic at the University of East Anglia (UEA), told the Observer that there is a reluctance to think of Shakespeare as “anything other than perfection” and that although the booing incident is known about, its significance has been overlooked.
He has analysed archival evidence, accounts from audience members and the plays themselves: “No fewer than four contemporary witnesses, including Jonson himself, attested to the heckles and hisses with which the cast was greeted by their first audience at the Globe.”
One contemporary wrote of being among those who “hissed Sejanus off the stage”.
Philo said: “Despite the fact that the cast lists have been known and that we know Sejanus was a flop, we’ve yet to acknowledge the fact that that means Shakespeare himself was heckled and hissed, and that Shakespeare himself was a victim of the early modern audience. We don’t tend to think of Shakespeare in terms of failure or things going wrong.
“I do wonder whether we’ve been reluctant to join the dots because we’re so used to thinking about Shakespeare in relation to success.”
Noting that both Sejanus and Othello were written in 1603 and performed by the same theatre company, the King’s Men – with Richard Burbage, the foremost celebrity actor of the day, in the leading roles – Philo argues that success and failure were part of the creative process: “Sometimes it works, sometimes it goes horribly awry. Shakespeare is involved in that process and he’s learning from that. The entire company is experimenting with new ideas.”
He added: “There is a lot more in common between Shakespeare’s tragic romance and Jonson’s imperial Rome than first meets the eye – similar plot devices, characterisation, opportunities for audience interaction and, most persuasively for me, shared phrasing that doesn’t appear anywhere else in Shakespeare’s work.”
He has singled out certain turns of phrase that Shakespeare uses only in Othello which also appear in Sejanus, and “verbal parallels”, noting for example that the “only appearance of the word ‘poppy’ in Shakespeare’s works is in Othello”: “Look where he comes./ Not poppy nor mandragora/ Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world/ Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep/ Which thou owned’st yesterday.”
It is also used, however, in “a strikingly similar context” in Sejanus: “The juice of poppy and of mandrakes. Sleep,/ Voluptuous Caesar, and security/ Seize on thy stupid powers, and leave them dead/ To public cares.”
Philo said that “poppy” is used as “something that can rob or coax the victim into sleep”: “The villain in Sejanus uses it in that sense and the villain in Othello also in that sense.”
He will present his findings in a forthcoming paper – Ben Jonson’s Sejanus and Shakespeare’s Othello: Two plays performed by the King’s Men in 1603 – to be published this month in the Cambridge University Press journal Shakespeare Survey.
Philo writes: “There are some compelling thematic parallels between Sejanus and Othello. In both cases, a manipulative servant provides the main driving force for their respective plots, and the action performed on stage is prompted by the interventions of Sejanus and Iago. In both plays, the most important plot device is the beguiling of a social superior – that is, of Othello and Tiberius. The plays share the same emphasis on exploiting the fears of the victim, and of cultivating a sustained sense of alarm or anxiety.”
He said that Sejanus is rarely performed today: “But then Jonson is always second fiddle to Shakespeare.”
Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford and editor of Shakespeare Survey, said: “I think we have been unwilling to think about Shakespeare as an actor. We’ve assumed that he learned about plays as many of us do, by reading them. This is fabulous research.”
