The Church of England was not certain how to even react to the bard.
The plays taught ethics and morality just like the church did but the plays actually made more sense to most people and left them with a greater passion about doing good than did the church did.
The problem was compounded because the Globe Theater consistently drew much larger crowds than did the church. When there was a new play the theater got most of the money. The church only got half the normal contributions. Sometimes people even stole from the church to buy tickets.
The Church was jealous and they were fearful.
What even constituted a church was coming into question because the churches were splintering off into what some would call cults like Puritans and Quakers. The Anglican Church changed it's religion daily in those days to stay ahead of the other churches. The main objective was to teach morality better than the other churches (and so assure heaven for the congregation). The bards plays were doing the best job of that than all the other churches combined!
The churches all wanted the Bard dead since the bard was the major threat to all the churches and they finally settled for closing down the Globe Theater for good in 1642.
The churches all wanted to find out the bard's identity but that never happened. They hunted continuously, always looking for a man.
I'll give you an example of probably what would have happened if the author was known. At that time both heresy and witchcraft were punished by death and both had fast trails.
Writing about the witches spell in Macbeth* was legal. However, the church could have changed the law and outlawed the 'uttering or printing of witches spells' before the theater put on a production of a play like Macbeth and kept that law a secret. Then it would have resulted in the death of the bard, which was me, and the actors in the play and probably all the actors in England (it would be called a conspiracy of evil or something like that. witches flying to meet other witches etc.).
Also, look at the numerous nations that were made upset by the plays. If England wanted a treaty with a country and their leader was a paranoid psycho who was convinced the play Hamlet was about him then he might have made the bard's death part of the treaty (quietly of course) and it would have gone to him in a basket. Or they may have just sent assassins.
From a more personal point of view:-
(The following is about ten minutes of my remembering that life. It's a bit spurious, empassioned and emotional. With a secretary I could get four times as much done. Also, it is incomplete whereas the previous information took me two weeks of mulling through to arrive at.)
My tirades at night on the tables at bars averaged about one attack an hour against the Church of England and the leaders of the government before I would decide to focus my anger on other men. I said enough to get my head chopped off at least once every night so they knew ahead of time that the plays were going to be controversial and would go into sacred territory. Keeping me a secret from the start was a necessity.
The prime owner of the theater wasn't Shakespeare as he wasn't even around half those years. The principle was a boatrite or ship builder that contracted out, many were for various governments. Anyone who is a contractor on large projects knows there are down times in the trade. He loved acting (either or his son that is) but for him it started out a hobby and then between contracts his men (perhaps with his son) would act and they built a stage. They just kept working on it and building whenever they had extra time. People would default on a contract. I think for a boat to seal well there is only a window of three months when they can use the lumber. So he would use the lumber for what was becoming a full size theater. It was just something to do with the time while waiting for the next ship contract. Then they met me and decided to move across the river and build it four times as large as it was.
They needed me because not once did they half fill the old theater and now they were going to move it and build it four times as large because of one night of my vomiting words, food and ale on them? It made not a bit of sense to me at the time but then nothing did in my sickness.
It was pretty close to the movie Field of Dreams. 'Build it and they will come.' However their field of dreams was not some nice placid corn field in Iowa so their reward was not nice ghosts. Their reward were the just deserves of the salty world of the sailor and dock worker. They got a man hating, syphilitic, alcoholic spitfire invective screaming bitch that refused to fuck a single one of them after she got cured.
Not only did we draw huge crowds of up to three thousand and that had never been seen before. They were larger crowds than the head Church of England drew. That was border line heresy right there. From then on our relationship with the church went right down hill. People would go steal from the church to buy a ticket to the theater.
Then the Queen started to say she like us and that made the Church even madder at us.
This can end up a big explanation and very extensive. I'll tell you the government was so corrupt that it lead the American Revolution but I am getting ahead of myself. I'll try to make it as short as possible by example. The Anglican Church was in charge of England's religion but the King was in charge of the church. You might put into a play reincarnation and the king might like the idea of coming back. Then he might die tomorrow and his son could be the rebellious type who changes everything about the religion. Or he might simply not like the idea of coming back to make amends. So he would make reincarnation a heresy. Then all the court would needs is one piece of paper from ay one of the plays with two mentions of reincarnation and according to the way the laws were written, every single actor in England was guilty of heresy by association. That is why originally there was nobody's name associated with the plays. That is also why you don't have any strong references to reincarnation (among many other issues of religion) in many of the plays. The biggest problem was you had to prove innocence. If they said something was illegal that you wrote into a play two year earlier you had to prove that every one of the dialogs were written before the law was passed and that was difficult to prove so it was like a retroactive law. It happened that they changed a law and we had to tear the place apart to find all the scripts that had been written and destroy them.
The problem that William had not addressed before he ever built the theater was that the size was way too large. It was twice as big as any other (I think) and it was the largest structure that had ever been built that allowed one person to address that many people (it being before amplifiers were invented) The plays got up to a thousand people excited all at the same time and that had never happened before except in a battle in a war! It looked like one of Adolph Hitler's Nuremberg Rally's to all the authorities and in the back of their heads they were asking themselves, 'When are the actors going to start yelling 'kill the queen and destroy the church''? Then maybe a thousand people would stampede out and take the palace, killing the queen, which I think was less than a mile away and then destroy the head church which was about half that distance, if I recall correctly. Or was it the other way around?
You might think it funny but at the time crowds that size had never been seen except on a battle field. The queen was Elizabeth and she was way cool at first until she got ripped for being too nice but the people around her were always looking for alarms to ring so they could get more power. The authorities would come in and see 600 people screaming 'kill the king' (It was maybe King Leer) and they would go running out of the theater yelling about there being a revolution and the guards got sent. The yelling of the audience sometimes got to the point where it would stop the play and you would hear the actors yelling back 'we can't change it because the other guy has to die in the next scene, he's really the bad guy' and then they would start to explain the details of the entire plot right in the middle of the play!
I had mixed feelings about this kind of interference by the audience since the authorities could have interpreted it as collusion and held the actors as accessories. I do think it happed numerous times and the actors were held until their innocence got established. (I had acted as an attorney for my husbands business and kept things legal.) The line had to be solidly drawn between the actors and the audience so if later the audience rioted we would not be indicted. I think I wanted to write something like the 'Pirates of Penzance' and it would been very popular except that some of the audience might have gotten drunk and stolen a ship and then we would have held accountable. I think that may have happened once too.**
At the same that the interruptions got me upset, it meant that I was motivating people far more than I expected to fight wrongs and that made me happy inside. That made the church very jealous and that also made me happy. Then the church would send people out looking for the man who wrote the play and I got to act the part of the stupid wash woman. Then in a situation like the above one a platoon of the kings guards would show up outside to make sure that everybody turned away from the palace when they left the play. Since it was the audience that caused the problem we didn't get into any trouble but it was great publicity whenever the army showed up for crowd control. We were assured of great run whenever that happened.
**These events are vague memories but most of the motivation for writing the plays were not. Often though, I paid no attention to the plays and once I penned them, they were finished and gone. So, many of the specifics in them I forgot that very day I wrote it 400 years ago. I want to mention this for a reason. There are passages in plays that I took less than ten minutes to write, never looked at again and forgot about it that very afternoon. One of my worries about coming forward with this information is that some poor scholar who spent months analyzing one of these short passages will ask me specifics about it and I forgot about it the afternoon I wrote it 400 years ago, haven't looked at it since and won't remember a thing about it!
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