Shakespeare: The Biography

CHAPTER 74. Hee Is Something Peeuish That Way

Shakespeare was on stage their last parts before the ageing queen. They performed at Whitehall on 26 December 1602 and at Richmond on 7 February 1603. Six weeks later Elizabeth was dead, worn out by age and power. In the last stages of her life she had refused to lie down and rest but had stood for days, her finger in her mouth, pondering upon the fate of sovereigns. The theatres had been closed five days before her death, since plays were not appropriate in the dying time.

By many, including the imprisoned Southampton, she was considered to be a tyrant who had exercised power for too long. Shakespeare was at the time criticised for writing no encomium on the dead queen — not one “sable teare” dropped from his “honied muse” as part of the national exequies. He had been asked to sing the “Rape” of Elizabeth “done by that Tarquin, Death,”¹ with reference to his earlier Rape of Lucrece, but he declined the honour. There was a ballad of the moment exhorting “you poets all”² to lament the queen. Shakespeare was at the head of the list of the poets invoked, among them Ben Jonson, but he made no response. In truth he had no real reason to mourn the queen’s passing. She had beheaded Essex and several members of Essex’s affinity whom Shakespeare knew very well.

Yet he was not altogether silent. He did produce in this period one work that cogently reflects the somewhat rancid and fearful atmosphere at the court of the dying queen. It was not an exequy, but a play entitled Troilus and Cressida in which all the certainties and pieties of court life are treated as material for jest and black humour. It has been surmised that the failure of the Essex rebellion in 1601 helped to create the atmosphere of gloom and discomfiture that pervades the play. It has even been suggested that there are allusions to the Earl of Essex within the text, where he is to be seen as Achilles skulking in his tent. There have been traced parallels among the other Greeks with various members of Elizabeth’s ancien régime such as Cecil and Walsingham — but one hypocritical and self-serving courtier looks very much like another.

It is unlikely that the censor would have forbidden publication of the play, in any case, since it is set in the ancient and mythical period surrounding the fall of Troy. It was a period favoured by Elizabethan poets and dramatists, and only four years before George Chapman’s translation of seven books of Homer’s Iliad had been published. Yet the publisher of Troilus and Cressida in the Stationers’ Register, James Roberts, is given the right to print “when he hath gotten sufficient aucthority for yt,” an unusual phrase that suggests some problem with its licensing.

The legend of Troy was one of the most popular of all the classical stories that circulated in Elizabethan England; it was the stuff of Homer and of Virgil. London itself was considered by many antiquarians to be New Troy, “Troynovaunt,” founded by the lineage of the refugees from the fallen city. Yet in Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare sets out deliberately to subvert the legends. It is a play in which the orthodox pieties of Trojan courage and Greek valour are quite overturned, revealing a callous, brutal and hypocritical reality underlying the acts of both sides. There are no values except those that are traded by time and fashion; traded is here the operative word, since every value is a commodity to be bought and sold in the market-place. This may indeed be a form of displaced patriotism. Shakespeare was prohibited from lamenting the condition of his own country on the London stage, but the presentation of the ancient world was treated with considerable leniency by the censors. What could be more natural than to vent his conservative fury in a safer context?

Troilus and Cressida is a savage and satirical comedy upon the themes of love and war, treating them both as false and fickle. The love between Troilus and Cressida is exposed as counterfeit, or temporary, when Cressida is seduced by a Greek warrior. It is in part Shakespeare’s revision of Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde, in which he supplants medieval grace and good humour with the language and vocabulary of a harsh and unsettled time. The diction itself is highly Latinised, with many “hard” words as well as an odd or convoluted syntax. As in Julius Caesar Shakespeare wished to give the verbal impression of an alien and classical world, and it is not too much to speculate that in Troilus and Cressida he tried to make English resemble what he considered to be Greek. He may also have been trying to rival Chapman’s translations of Homer. It has been remarked that his was an envious muse. He had to outdo Chaucer as well as Chapman, to rewrite the heroic myth of the Greeks and the Romans.

But in Troilus and Cressida the pertinence of satire and sarcasm, raillery and buffoonery, cannot be doubted. It is unlikely to have been performed in the queen’s presence, but it was played at the Globe. The entry in the Stationers’ Register states that the play will be “as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens Men” and the printed version, published some six years later, declares that this is the play “as it was acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe.” So Troilus and Cressida was played during the reign of Elizabeth, and during the succeeding reign of James I. This suggests that it was a popular play, perhaps pandering to the popular dislike of the Greeks as opposed to the Trojans who were the presumed ancestors of Londoners. It has been argued that at some point it was performed at one of the Inns of Court.³ A prologue and an epilogue were composed for that occasion, the latter of which has a private air of salaciousness. This would account for an “epistle” written for the quarto version in which the play is described as “a new play, neuer stal’d with the Stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulgar” or “the smoaky breath of the multitude.” If Shakespeare had revised the play for the particular delectation of a legal audience, then it could pass by convenient fiction as a “new play”.

Nevertheless it remains Shakespeare’s most savage drama, with the possible exception of Timon of Athens, and has prompted more romantic biographers into assuming that the dramatist suffered some kind of “nervous breakdown” in the middle of composition. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was never more sharp-eyed. There is a slight confusion among his publishers, however. The quarto edition describes it as a “Historie” but the “epistle” to that quarto refers to it as a comedy; in turn the later Folio version refers to it as a “Tragedie.” This suggests some uncertainty concerning its final or ultimate tone.

That is why it is a mistake to attribute some kind of private motive behind Shakespeare’s choice of material. Nothing in his life and career gives any reason to suggest that he chose a theme or story with any specific intention other than to entertain. He had no “message.” The most likely explanation for his choice of the Trojan wars lies within the context of theatrical competition. In 1596 the Admiral’s Men performed a play that Henslowe simply noted as “troye.”⁴ Three years later Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle were paid for a play entitled “Troyeles & creasse daye” and then, at a later date, for one entitled “Agamemnon”(first listed as “troylles & Creseda”). So the fate of the unfortunate Trojan pair were elements in the new theatrical environment. It seems highly likely, then, that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men asked Shakespeare to provide a drama upon the same theme. As soon as he began to write, however, the power of his genius colluded with the forces of his age to produce a complete statement. His words were magnetic. All the particles of a decaying court culture, a decaying world of individual heroism and nobility, flew towards them.

CHAPTER 75. I, But the Case Is Alter’d

The queen was dead. Long live the king! Elizabeth had died at two in the morning of 24 March 1603; nine hours later, a crowd of courtiers and nobles who had assembled on the west side of the High Cross in Cheapside listened to a proclamation by Cecil and then shouted out “God save King James!” As one courtier put it, quoting a psalm, “We had heaviness in the night but joy in the morning.” The news was brought to the prisoners in the Tower of London and Southampton, among them, rejoiced. Southampton had been condemned to life imprisonment for his part in the ill-fated Essex rebellion, but he was quickly released from his confinement by the new king.

King James had made a slow procession from Scotland, and did not arrive at his palace in Greenwich until 13 May. Then, six days later, letters patent were issued “pro Laurentio Fletcher et Willielmo Shakespeare….” permitting them to perform as “well for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them,” both “within their now usual house called The Globe” and all the other towns and boroughs of the kingdom. They were no longer to be known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. They were the King’s Men. A few months later they were appointed “grooms of the chamber” and their social status therefore greatly improved. They were given the right, indeed the duty, of wearing the royal livery of red doublet, hose and cloak. Shakespeare was placed first in the list, by the Master of the Great Wardrobe, for receiving 4½ yards of scarlet cloth for his uniform.

It is perhaps odd to consider Shakespeare as a royal servant, following in procession on ceremonial occasions, but there is no reason to believe that he questioned the privilege. It was, in a real sense, the height of his social accomplishment. Gone were the days when players were classified with strolling vagrants, and were often turned back by the aldermen of various towns. Gone, too, were the days when the actors were merely tolerated rather than welcomed in the capital. The new king, very early in his reign, had bestowed his favours upon them. Before the reign of James, the Globe players had been called upon to perform at court on approximately three occasions each year; in the first ten years of his reign they were asked to play fourteen times each year. So the court was a source of profit, as well as patronage, to the King’s Men.

There were of course those of a jealous disposition. A play by Francis Beaumont on the subject of social climbing, The Woman Hater, struck a glancing blow at Shakespeare’s elevation with the remark that “another payre you shall see, that were heire apparent legges to a Glover, these legges hope shortly to bee honourable.” Shakespeare’s modest origins were by now well known.

It is significant that William Shakespeare and Laurence Fletcher were first mentioned in the letters patent. Fletcher, hitherto never mentioned as one of the Globe players, had in fact been leader of a group of Scottish actors who had in previous years been patronised and welcomed by James when he was James VI of Scotland; he had even protected them against the depredations of the Kirk. Fletcher had been known as “comedyan to his majestic” So he travelled south with the new English monarch and, as the sovereign’s true servant, had been placed with the new company of the King’s Men. The fact that he is named before Shakespeare in the letters patent suggests, however, that by common consent Shakespeare was the leader or principal man of the Globe players.

Many of Shakespeare’s earlier plays were now revived for royal performance. The King’s Men put on new productions of The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry V and The Merchant of Venice. If James had not previously been acquainted with the work of Shakespeare, the oversight was now remedied. He seems particularly to have enjoyed The Merchant of Venice; he asked for it to be performed again, perhaps because the legal scene between Portia and Shylock satisfied his own taste for disputation. But it is more significant that all of Shakespeare’s new plays — those written after 1603, in other words — were performed at least once before the king. Some of them were performed several times. The records of payment demonstrate that, whenever the King’s Men performed at court, the king himself watched the proceedings.

The presence of the new monarch, then, had an effect upon the dramatist’s art. It could hardly be otherwise. The London theatre always had to look towards the sources of power and of patronage. The monarch was the lord of the spectacle. So it is no real cause of wonder to discover that, after the accession of James, Shakespeare was ready to shape certain of his plays to reveal the figure of the king somewhere in the design. This is the case with Macbeth and, to a certain extent, with Measure for Measure. The plays reflect, for example, James’s well-known fear of witchcraft — especially the form of magic aimed against a ruling sovereign. They reflect his fear of crowds, and his habitual dislike of Puritans. The ruling family’s great liking for masques also affects the staging of tableaux and dumb-shows in Shakespeare’s last plays, where music and dance play a large part in the concluding action.

But the King’s Men could not stay in London to enjoy their privileged position. The plague had returned to the city. John Stow later estimated that, out of a population of approximately two hundred thousand, some thirty-eight thousand died. After this date, the references to plague in Shakespeare’s plays take on a much darker hue than hitherto; there are references to death tokens and to plague sores. It was not some local difficulty but a pressing and ominous reality; at a conservative estimate some seven years of Shakespeare’s career were affected by what was known as “the death.” Contemporary Londoners believed that the plague came from planetary influences, blasting the air with fever. Yet of course, though Londoners did not know it, the rats and their fleas had come back.

The king eventually granted his new players some £30 for “maynte-naunce and releife” during the epidemic, but it was still necessary for them to go on tour. By the end of May 1603, the King’s Men had begun their travels to the plague-free regions of Maldon, Ipswich, Coventry, Shrewsbury, Bath and Oxford where, among other of Shakespeare’s dramas, they played Hamlet. It was in this year, too, that the first quarto of Hamlet was published; from its relative shortness, it may have been a version of the play prepared for this particular tour. The journey to Maldon and Ipswich is likely to have been conducted by sea. They travelled many hundreds of miles. They visited more towns than can now be shown in the official records, and must have given more than fifty performances. There is also a possibility that Shakespeare visited Stratford, since it is less than twenty miles from Coventry. It is certain, however, that he would not have remained in London.

The plague was particularly prevalent in Southwark. In Shakespeare’s own parish more than two and a half thousand people died within the space of six months. Two of Shakespeare’s old colleagues, William Kempe and Thomas Pope, expired; they had both been residents of Southwark. So the epidemic fury sent Shakespeare away. At some point in this period, he left the Bankside shore and moved to another part of London. He changed his address from Southwark to the more fashionable and affluent neighbourhood of Silver Street, between Cripplegate and Cheapside. He was once more a lodger, living in a house at the corner of Silver Street and Muggle (Monkswell) Street as a tenant of a Huguenot family called the Mountjoys. Christopher Mountjoy was a wig-maker and “tire-maker,” a maker of ornamental headdresses; he catered for the theatrical trade as well as for private patrons, and he was no doubt associated with the King’s Men in a professional capacity.

His was a large and commodious house of three storeys with jettied upper floor and attics; there is an image of it in the Agas map of London, executed in 1560, where even on a small scale it looks relatively imposing. Mountjoy’s shop was at ground level, shielded from the weather by a “pentice” or roof, with the living apartments above. Silver Street itself, as its name implies, was a rich street. John Stow described it as containing “divers fair houses.” It was also famous for its wig-makers such as Mountjoy himself. In The Silent Woman a wife’s hair is said to be “made” in Silver Street. Here Shakespeare shared the house with Mountjoy, his wife and daughter, as well as three apprentices and a servant called Joan. He was perhaps reminded of the time when he lived above a shop in Henley Street, also in the company of apprentices. By the standards of the period, however, this was a relatively small and quiet establishment. But it was not without its internal disharmonies. Madame Mountjoy had been conducting an affair with a local tradesman, and had consulted Simon Forman about a possible pregnancy. Her daughter was being pursued by one of the apprentices, with the active encouragement of Shakespeare himself.

When Shakespeare had resided in Southwark he had been close to the theatre, and subject to the appearance of uninvited colleagues and friends. But he was by no means isolated in Silver Street. He was close to his old Stratford friend, the publisher Richard Field; Mrs. Field, herself a Huguenot, worshipped at the same French church as Madame Mountjoy. In certain respects late sixteenth-century London still resembled a small town or village. He was also a few yards from the bookstalls of St. Paul’s Churchyard, where he would have seen his own plays on sale for sixpence. He could have picked up the short version of The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke at Nicholas Ling’s new shop by St. Dunstan’s in the West near St. Paul’s in Fleet Street.

The subject of booksellers was close to Shakespeare. He needed books, expensive though the majority of them were, to furnish his art. By 1600 there were some hundred publishers as well as a score of printers and an indeterminate number of booksellers. The figures can only be approximate since one man or shop might combine two or three of these separate trades. All printers were, for example, in some degree also publishers; but not all publishers were printers. Many of the booksellers were established in Paternoster Row, that quarter of the city behind St. Paul’s Cathedral where the trade clustered, and there were at least seventeen bookshops in St. Paul’s Churchyard itself. The area remained the centre of the book-publishing business until the fire-storms of the Second World War entirely destroyed it. It was a relatively small trade, compared to the printing and publishing business of such continental centres as Bruges and Antwerp, but it was well established and well organised. The London publishers were skilful and professional with relatively high standards of type-setting, proof-reading and printing. The publication of plays, Shakespeare’s among them, comprised only a very small part of their overall trade. Books of sermons and of meditations, as well as books of history and domestic etiquette, sold far more. But sales must be set in perspective. The most popular books had an approximate print-run of 1,250 copies.

Close to Paternoster Row stood Stationers’ Hall, the centre of the guild of the publishers, printers and booksellers where were placed the registers of the books published and licensed in the city. They were inspected for any offence against state or religion, and were then duly entered at the cost of 6 pence. Although many books were not entered, any registered book was deemed to be under the copyright of the publisher. Severe penalties were imposed upon any breaches of copyright, which included fines and confiscations as well as the more serious punishment of the printing press being broken up. So it seems unlikely that many of Shakespeare’s plays emerged in “pirated” form, as has sometimes been suggested. But in the case of these plays there was a long history of transference from one publisher to another. John Busby registered The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, and on the same day transferred it to Arthur Johnson, who promptly published it. Andrew Wise registered and published three of the history plays in the late 1590s, and then five years later transferred them to Matthew Law. There are other publishers involved in the transmission of Shakespeare’s texts — Nicholas Ling, John Danter, Thomas Millington, James Roberts and Edward Blount among them. They were tradesmen principally, concerned to earn a profit, and were in no sense “patrons” of the dramatist.

Close to his new neighbourhood, too, was John Heminges; he rented a house in Addle Street owned by Thomas Savage, the goldsmith who was also a trustee of the Globe. Another colleague from the playhouse, Henry Condell, lived in the same parish as Heminges. In that sense the area was an extension of Shakespeare’s theatrical family. It seems very likely that he was the godfather to John Heminges’s son, William, who was christened in the autumn of 1603 at the church of St. Mary’s Aldermanbury a few yards away from Silver Street. If the three friends sometimes travelled together to the Globe, it was a matter of a few hundred yards’ walk to the wherries that would carry them over the Thames.

It has sometimes been surmised, however, that Shakespeare’s removal from Southwark was also a sign of some growing detachment from the life of the playhouse — and that, at some point in this period, he gave up acting without of course abandoning his career as dramatist. He is listed among the players for Ben Jonson’s Sejanus in 1603, but is not mentioned as playing in the production of the same dramatist’s Volpone in 1605. This is a significant omission, if in that interval there lies the decision to leave the stage. He had invested heavily in Stratford land, and did not need an actor’s income. He also earned money from his share in the Globe, as well as from his plays. He was forty years of age, middle-aged in Elizabethan terms, and may have tired of the endless activity of the stage. And was it right, for a landed gentleman, still to tread the boards? From 1603 to 1616, his company was engaged in a great deal of provincial travelling. Touring cannot have been a pursuit he still welcomed. He may have preferred to confine his travels to the route between London and Stratford, making the journey from Silver Street to New Place unencumbered by an actor’s duties.

Silver Street was itself not immune to the plague. In the course of the epidemic a royal musician, Henry Sandon, died together with his daughter. A painter, William Linley, succumbed with his wife. The porter of the Barber Surgeons’ Hall, nearby in Monkwell Street, also expired. So it is likely that in the summer and autumn of 1603 Shakespeare was either residing in Stratford or taking part in what would have been his last provincial tour.

The doors of the London theatres were of course shut for most of this year. The playhouses were automatically closed when mortality from the plague reached thirty a week, and the outbreak of 1603 far surpassed that figure. By October the companies had returned from their touring, and were hoping that the theatres might reopen. In a letter from their house on Bank-side Edward Alleyn’s wife wrote to her husband, staying at Bexhill, “my own self (your self) and my mother, and the whole house, are in good health, and about us the Sickness doth cease, and is likely more and more, by God’s help, to cease. All the companies be come home, and are well, for aught we know …”¹

Yet all cannot have been entirely well, since the King’s Men then decamped to the estate of Augustine Phillips in plague-free Mortlake by the Thames. In this small riverine town also lived John Dee, the magus and scientist whose predictions and exploits had made him famous in late sixteenth-century society. He had even been consulted by Queen Elizabeth. It is possible that the actors encountered the notorious Doctor Dee during their residence in Mortlake. It would at least give a context to the persistent reports that Shakespeare in part modelled the character of Prospero on this contemporary magician.

The removal of Phillips from London did not delay his death. In the spring of 1604 he died at Mortlake, bequeathing “to my ffellowe William Shakespeare a Thirty shillings peece in gould.” To a former apprentice Phillips left a purple cloak, a sword and a dagger; to a newer apprentice he bequeathed his musical instruments. Shakespeare heads the list of colleagues and house-keepers in the will, however, a prominence which suggests that Phillips had an especial attachment to him.

Phillips may have acted towards the close of 1603, however, when the King’s Men performed for the first time before their new patron. From Mortlake they were obliged to travel to Wilton, the Earl of Pembroke’s estate near Salisbury in Wiltshire, where on 2 December they played for the sovereign. John Heminges was paid £30 “for the paynes and expenses of himself and the rest of the company in coming from Mortelake in the countie of Surrie unto the court aforesaid and there presenting before his majestie one playe.”² There have been numerous reports that a letter once existed, written by the Countess of Pembroke from Wilton House. She is supposed to have counselled her son to come with the king from Salisbury, in order to see a performance of As You Like It; she also mentioned the fact that “we have the man Shakespeare with us.” The letter has disappeared, but the story lingers. It is not necessarily apocryphal, and the remark has the appropriate ring of noblesse oblige. But it cannot now be substantiated. There are even reports of an “amicable” letter from King James himself to the dramatist, but this is beyond conjecture. It may have been the Earl of Pembroke, however, who recommended that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men be given royal patronage; he had been closely involved with Shakespeare and Burbage, as we have seen, and he had also become a confidant of the new king.

From Wilton, the king and his retinue moved to Hampton Court. The King’s Men moved with them. They would not return to London until the early spring. One courtier observed that at Hampton Court “we had every night a publicke play in the great halle, at which the King was ever present, and liked or disliked as he saw cause: but it seems he takes no extraordinary pleasure in them. The Queene and Prince were more the players frendes, for on other nights they had them privately.”³ So the king was perhaps not enamoured of the drama. He was himself of a theatrical disposition, and went to some pains to announce his majesty in dramatic and symbolic way; his long delayed “entry” into London proceeded under great triumphal arches designed to renew the example of Rome. It is likely, then, that he viewed theatrical representations as but a shadow of the real spectacle of power and authority. The fact remains, however, that the players performed before him far more frequently than they ever performed before his predecessor. In this period, too, the dramatist himself was being described as “Friendly Shakespeare” in whose plays “the Commedian rides when the Tragedian stands on Tip-toe,” and thus manages “to please all.”⁴ “All” included the new sovereign.

CHAPTER 76. I Will a Round Unvarnish’d Tale Deliuer

The king entered London, as into his kingdom, on 15 March 1604. It was a triumphant occasion, not least because it was a celebration of the fact that the epidemic plague had finally retreated from the city. It was for this occasion that Shakespeare and his fellows had been given the 4½ yards of scarlet cloth, so they are likely to have been part of the ceremonial procession through the streets of London from the Tower to Westminster. It was an historic walk by Shakespeare through the city that had nourished him. It is possible that he, or one of his colleagues, made a speech at one of the triumphal arches; their rival, Edward Alleyn, made an oration as the “Genius” or guiding spirit of the city. It may have been Alleyn’s last performance, since in this year he retired from the acting profession. The pageants at Bishopsgate and Fenchurch Street were devised respectively by Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson. Dekker seems to have borrowed from Shakespeare in his address to the king:

This little world of men; this pretious Stone,

That sets out Europe …

Since Thomas Middleton was also brought in to provide some suitable verses for the occasion, the absence of Shakespeare from this cast-list of royal panegyrists is somewhat puzzling. He could hardly have declined the honour. It may have been implicitly understood, however, that he was not that kind of writer. There were seven triumphal gates, created in the style of Roman arches by Stephen Harrison; there were fountains, and flames, and living statuary. Shakespeare himself adopted the device of a statue coming alive, at a later date, in The Winter’s Tale. It was a thoroughly theatrical occasion, complete with all the crowds and noise that the new king detested.

The King’s Men were called upon to perform other royal services in this first full year of the new king’s reign. Twelve of them were appointed grooms of the chamber in the summer of 1604, when in August they were charged with the entertainment of the Spanish Ambassador Extraordinary and his retinue of 234 gentlemen who had come to London in order to negotiate the signing of a peace treaty; they had taken up residence for eighteen days in Somerset House, which had become the palace of the queen. The duties of Shakespeare and his colleagues are not detailed, and it is even possible that Shakespeare himself avoided attendance; if he was no longer an actor, there might be no need for him. The players were there, however, to look decorative and to fulfil their role as courtiers. They may even have been asked to perform; but there are no records of any play being staged, and each of them was paid what seems to have been a bare minimum of 2 shillings per day.

The King’s Men were travelling in the spring and summer of 1604; they visited Oxford, for example, in May and June. It is unlikely, as we have seen, that Shakespeare now travelled with them. During this period he completed two plays that were performed at court towards the close of 1604; Othello and Measure for Measure were staged respectively in November and December of this year. Since the public theatres had been allowed to open again in April, one or both of these plays had first been shown at the Globe. They were the first productions of the King’s Men after their return from Hampton Court. It has been suggested that Othello and Measure for Measure are both dark plays for a dark time, born of the plague and the queen’s death, with the tragedy of Othello and Desdemona preceding the bitter and forlorn story of Angelo and Isabella. But in fact they seem to have been written in a period of general rejoicing at the new king’s accession, with Shakespeare reaching the pinnacle of his social eminence.

The King’s Men were acting as courtiers for the Ambassador Extraordinary of Spain in the period when Othello “the Moor” was being created. The “Moor” himself is of Spanish origin while two of the other characters in the play, Roderigo and Iago, have recognisably Spanish names. Even in the period when Shakespeare was writing there was a concerted Spanish effort to expel the very large population of Moors from their country. The Moors, like the Jews, were the victims of European racial prejudice. There was also a large colony of Moors in London, refugees from Spanish persecution. Elizabeth I issued an edict against “the great number of negars and blackamoors which are crept into the realm since the troubles between Her Highness and the King of Spain”.

In 1600 a Moorish ambassador for the King of Barbary came to Elizabeth’s court, and became an object of fascinated attention. There is ample reason for Shakespeare to have seen, and even spoken with, him. He played before him at court, during the Christmas season. The Moor sat for his portrait during this visit, too, and the image of this dignified if somewhat withdrawn figure must have impressed itself upon Shakespeare’s conception of Othello. At the age of forty-two he looks haunted, forever watchful. It is a mistake to consider Othello to be of African or West Indian origin, as is often the case in modern productions. He was of Moorish stock, olive-skinned, and Shakespeare portrays him as “black” for the purposes of theatrical emphasis and symbolism. In Shylock Shakespeare had created a character of some complexity; by the time he came upon Othello, he had become even more interested in the role and nature of the scapegoat. But it would be a mistake to assume that he had any overt humanitarian purpose. Instead he had a keen eye and ear for theatrical intrigue.

There are other contemporary matters that must be seen in the context of Othello, if only because they would have been known to every member of the audience who witnessed the first production. King James had a pronounced sympathy for the Spanish state; that is why Shakespeare and his fellows were entertaining the Ambassador Extraordinary in Somerset House. But there was also a well-attested story publicised throughout Europe that the previous king of Spain, Philip II, was an insanely jealous husband who had strangled his wife in her bed. What is more, he had become suspicious of her when she had inadvertently dropped her handkerchief. These parallels are too close to be coincidental. The fact that Cyprus becomes the scene of the tragic action of Othello is also explicable in these terms. Cyprus was once a Venetian protectorate but had been occupied by Turkish forces for more than thirty years, and thus posed a threat to Spanish as well as Venetian interests in the region. King James himself had written a poem upon the subject. So Shakespeare was deliberately reflecting the interests and preoccupations of the sovereign. During the present reign of Philip III, too, Spain was at odds with the republic of Venice. It would be too much to claim, as some commentators have done, that Othello “represents” Spain and that Desdemona “represents” Venice. Yet it is undoubtedly true that Shakespeare’s imagination, magnetised, as it were, around Spain, had drawn in everything. He had become, for the purposes of this play, a vessel for all things Spanish.

So it would be wrong to state that Shakespeare never wrote a play concerning contemporary life. Othello was a very modern drama, refracting all the circumstances of the period. Shakespeare also read some recently published translations that suited his purpose — among them A Geographical Historie of Africa and Pliny’s Historie of the World. He also read Sir Lewis Lewkenor’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice. These books were published in 1600, 1601 and 1599 respectively, so we may plausibly imagine Shakespeare as a haunter of bookstalls, picking up any recently printed volumes as a spur to his creativity. The booksellers pointed out their recent acquisitions, and his noble patrons may have informed him of the latest fashionable volume. But there was a pattern to his reading. The evidence of Othello suggests that, when he had hit upon a theme, he opened those books that were directly relevant to it. He was searching for local “colour” but also for the circumstantial detail and the significant phrase.

The question of Shakespeare’s learning has vexed many commentators. Its extent can perhaps be measured in the simple statement that he learned as much as he needed to learn. He had no wasted or superfluous knowledge. He was familiar with the classics of the schoolroom, as we have seen, and for his own dramatic purposes used Ovid and Virgil, Terence and Plautus. He could read Latin, and possibly even a smattering of Greek, but he preferred to use translations wherever possible. He read North’s translation of Plutarch rather than Plutarch himself, for example, and read Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses rather than the great original. He would have been obliged, however, to read Plautus and Ovid’s Fasti in Latin. He was not interested in these texts for their own sake, only for what they inspired within him. He was of course thoroughly familiar with all of his source material, whether it be out of Plutarch or Holinshed. This may also come under the rubric of useful learning. He was not a scholar, an antiquarian or a philosopher. He was a dramatist. He seems in fact to have distrusted philosophy, rational discourse and sententiousness in all of its forms. Abstract language was his abhorrence. He trusted only language imbued with action and with character, with time and with place.

It is possible that he could read both French and Italian, but he preferred to use translations wherever possible. It is not a question of laziness but of efficiency. The fact that he preferred English versions of foreign stories also suggests that he was not particularly interested in the “otherness” of other cultures. It was his habit to search through books, old or new, looking for that which his imagination could use. He seems on occasions to have read the summaries of the text in the margin rather than the text itself. His knowledge of popular botany, medicine, astrology, astronomy, and other matters, is extensive rather than profound; his alertness and power of assimilation were unique, so that he seems to know “more” than his contemporaries. He picked up everything.

We may make an informed guess about the books he assimilated. Among them are William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, Geoffrey Fenton’s Certaine Tragicall Discourses, Bandello’s Novelle, Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, George Whetstone’s Heptameron, Arthur Brooke’s Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet and the anonymous A Hundreth Mery Tales. They are what might be called “light” contemporary reading. He seems to have had a particular affection for anthologies of romance stories and for the new Italian novels, and it has already been noted how closely his work followed the model of the popular romances. But he also read the English poets, principal among them Edmund Spenser and Geoffrey Chaucer; he seems to have sensed, justifiably, that these were his real predecessors. He also seems to have read poetical miscellanies such as The Paradyse of Daynty Devises and A Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions. There is some hint, too, that he read contemporary poets such as Donne and Southwell in manuscript form. He may have read those plays by his contemporaries that had emerged in print, although it is always possible that he preferred to watch them. He was acquainted with Montaigne and with Machiavelli, but such knowledge was commonplace at the time. It is unlikely that he studied them with any great attention.

He may have owned a library or carried his store of books with him in a book-chest. He mentions libraries only twice in his published work. Yet he could have used the libraries of patrons, such as Southampton or Pembroke, and of course he might have lingered and read in Richard Field’s bookshop. He must have had one or two books physically close to him, however, since there are occasions when he quotes long passages almost verbatim from Plutarch and from Holinshed. Various books have emerged over the last three centuries, bearing Shakespeare’s signature, but the chances of forgery and fakery are high. The most plausible and likely candidate for inclusion among Shakespeare’s books, however, is the signed edition of Lambarde’s Archaionomia mentioned earlier. It would not seem appropriate material for a forger, unlike the works of Ovid or of Plutarch, and the volume does indeed chime with Shakespeare’s youthful legal interests. So there may be a true connection.

When he read his primary source narrative for Othello, Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, he must have been struck — inspired, rather — by its first sentence. “Fu gia in Venezia un Mow”. There was a Moor in Venice. Venice had been the site of his first outcast, in the person of Shylock. Othello was another example of the dispersed and dispossessed, the wanderers of the earth. There was a Moor in Venice. Cinthio’s narrative is a prose tale, but something within it stirred all the powers of Shakespeare’s sympathetic imagination. He immensely deepened and broadened the story, so that the first two acts of the play in particular bear very little resemblance to any possible originals. A measure of his contribution is to be found in the fact that all the names of the characters, apart from that of Desdemona, were formulated by him. He also revised his play, giving Desdemona more pathos and credibility, and, because he must have realised in performance that Emilia, the wife of Iago, had become too unsympathetic a creation, he gave her more dialogue with Desdemona so that she gained in sympathy.

The play, with the title of The Moor of Venis by “Shaxberd,” was performed for the king and his court on 1 November 1604 in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. It was not written for private performance, of course, and it had already been played at the Globe and in the guildhalls of the company’s provincial tours. Richard Burbage, as Othello, would have “blacked up.” There was no occasion for subtlety in the presentation. A versifier later commented upon Burbage’s role as “the grieved Moor.” One curiosity concerns the part of Othello. When Ben Jonson described Shakespeare’s own character he considered that he “was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature.”¹ He is quoting almost verbatim from Iago’s description of Othello (677-8):

The Moore is of a free and open nature,

That thinkes men honest, that but seeme to be so.

It may be an inadvertent recollection on Jonson’s part, but does it suggest that Shakespeare was in some sense “like” Othello? The theme of sexual jealousy runs deeply through many of Shakespeare’s plays. Could Jonson have known that Shakespeare harboured suspicions about his wife in Stratford? It has become a well-known theory, promulgated among others by James Joyce and Anthony Burgess, but it must remain wholly theoretical. It might just as well be said that, because both Julius Caesar and Othello suffer from epilepsy, Shakespeare was personally acquainted with the disorder.

If a boy played Desdemona, he must have been a skilful and remarkable actor. He had to suggest a certain eroticism within Desdemona’s innocence; as the German philosopher Heinrich Heine put it, “What repels me most every time are Othello’s references to his wife’s moist palm.”² The boy actor would also have had a good voice, able to sing popular ballads. Since Desdemona’s willow song is absent from the first published version of the play, however, it is likely that for some performances he was unavailable for the part.

It might come as a surprise to contemporary audiences that Iago, customarily seen as the epitome of evil in modern productions, was initially played by the company’s resident clown and fool, Robert Armin. Iago was in the comic mode, and spoke to the audience in his confidential soliloquies. Charles Gildon, at the end of the seventeenth century, disclosed that

I’m assur’d from very good hands, that the Person that Acted Iago was in much esteem for a Comoedian, which made Shakespeare put several words, and expressions into his part (perhaps not so agreeable to his Character) to make the Audience laugh, who had not yet learnt to endure to be serious a whole Play.³

Iago’s role as comedian also fits the essentially comic structure of the play itself. Of course Gildon is alluding here to the sexual bawdry and innuendo in which Iago indulges with Desdemona, but he is being less than fair to Shakespeare. The dramatist loved sexual slang, and would not have considered it as writing “down” to any audience. It was a part of his imagination. As for being “serious” for “a whole Play” there is not one drama of Shakespeare’s which aspires to that unity of mood or tone. Comedy and tragedy were equal parts of his art.

There are elements of Roman new comedy and Italian learned comedy in this play with the presence of the zany and the cuckold who is also the Spanish braggart. But again they are here enriched beyond measure. Shakespeare used “types” as a matter of course, but they were simply the structure upon which he built. It is also worth observing that Othello is unique in being a tragedy largely established upon comic formulae. That may even have been the task that Shakespeare set himself. He establishes a comic structure, in which the locales of Venice and Cyprus have little connection with the main action, but then all begins to go awry. In the process he manages to enter the very rhythm of his characters in the world. They are deeply embedded in their language, with their own particular vocabulary and even cadence, so that we can as it were see Shakespeare living and breathing in unison with them. It is a miracle of transference. And we can feel the propulsion of his imagination. When a character mentions the “enchafed flood,” the immediate response is that the Turkish fleet be not “ensheltered and embayed”; the syllables push him forward into new paths of thought.

It has been suggested that in some way Iago is a refraction of the dramatist, an unmoved mover whose intellectual agility far outruns any moral conscientiousness, but in fact he is closer to the medieval Vice who stirred up trouble with the unwitting connivance of the audience. No doubt, however, Shakespeare derived great pleasure from creating a villain who orchestrates his victims like a dramatist while at the same time proclaiming his honesty and sympathy on every occasion.

CHAPTER 77. Why, Sir, What’s Your Conceit in That?

Three days after the performance of Othello in the Banqueting House, The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed in the same setting. There is a description of the king attending a performance. When the king entered

the cornets and trumpets to the number of fifteen or twenty began to play very well a sort of recitative, and then after his Majesty had seated himself under a canopy alone … he caused the ambassadors to sit below him on two stools, while the great officers of the crown and courts of law sat upon benches.¹

But the hall, with “ten heights of degrees for people to stand upon,”² seems by general consent to have been too large for comfort. It was 100 feet long, with 292 glass windows. It had been erected by Elizabeth twenty-three years before, and King James described it as an “old, rotten and slight-built shed.”³ The Great Hall at court was prepared, instead, for the production of Shakespeare’s second new play of the year, Measure for Measure.

Before that event, however, another play was to emerge from the King’s Men only to disappear very rapidly. It was entitled Gowry and purported to be a dramatic version of the “Gowrie conspiracy” against James four years before. The play no doubt celebrated the courage and virtue of the new sovereign but, despite its patriotic tone, it was deemed unsuitable for public performance. One courtier wrote on 18 December that

The Tragedy of Gowrie, with all actions and actors, hath been twice represented by the King’s Players, with exceeding concourse of all sorts of people; but whether the matter or manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that princes should be played on the stage in their lifetime, I hear that some great councellors are much displeased with it, and so it is thought it shall be forbidden.⁴

It was indeed considered to be unfit, and the play disappeared never to rise again. The courtier had hit upon the right explanation. It was considered lèsemajesté to portray a reigning monarch upon the public stage, in whatever circumstances. It served only to emphasise the theatricality of the king’s role. The author of the forbidden play remains unknown, although it is not beyond conjecture that Shakespeare may have contributed to it.

James could not have been wholly displeased by his players since, a week later, they performed before him Measure for Measure. In this play a ruler, Duke Vincentio, disliking crowds and noise of “applause, and Aues vehement,” pretends to absent himself from his land in order better to survey it. In his absence a rigidly puritanical deputy, Angelo, proves himself unworthy of his superior’s trust. There are enough contemporary allusions here to have occasioned volumes of commentary, not least the resemblance between the Duke and King James himself. The king was known to dislike crowds and “Aues” to the same degree as the imaginary ruler. The unflattering portrayal of the Puritan, Angelo, must be seen in reference to the current controversies involving those sectarians in the new kingdom. That, at least, is how contemporary playgoers would have viewed it. Earlier that year, for example, the king had been presented by the country’s foremost Puritans with a “Millenary Petition,” containing proposals on dogma and ritual that the king rebuffed. The conclusion of the play, in which the Duke redeems those who have been judged guilty, can also be said to reflect current controversies over the privileges of the king. James believed that Parliament depended upon royal grace, and the ending of Measure for Measure can be construed as maintaining the divine right of kings. The title of the play itself may be taken from a sentence from James’s own treatise on divine right, Basilikon Down, in which he writes: “And, above all, let the measure of your love to everyone be according to the measure of his virtue.” The King’s Men were precisely that, the sovereign’s servants, and part of their role was to advertise the virtues of their patron. Since the play is also set in Catholic Vienna, with a Catholic nun as the principal female and the Duke disguising himself as a Catholic friar, Shakespeare seems to be reflecting the increased level of tolerance for those who professed the old faith. It is pertinent, perhaps, that in this play as in Romeo and Juliet and in Much Ado About Nothing, the friar counsels deceit or concealment for the sake of a greater good. Shakespeare seems always to have been preternaturally alert to the prevailing atmosphere of his time. He was such a sensitive instrument in the world that he could not help but reflect everything.

Shakespeare derived some of the story of Measure for Measure from the same source as Othello. This suggests that he had riffled through Cinthio’s Hecatommithi in search of likely plots. An anthology of stories, such as this one, was a mine of gold. When he found this particular plot to be of interest, he looked up an earlier dramatisation of it — George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra, written in 1578—to see if there were any extra scenes or characters he might borrow. There were more immediate models to hand, also, since the theme of the ruler in disguise was a popular one in the London playhouses. It is important to grasp the immediacy of Shakespeare’s inspiration. If there were two or three plays using a plot or character that had proved popular, the chances are that he would use them. Even though Measure for Measure is ostensibly set in Vienna, its real setting is early seventeenth-century London with its stews and suburbs, bawds and pandars. It is the world of Southwark and the Globe. Measure for Measure is in part a sketch for King Lear and The Tempest; here the Duke abandons the governance of his dukedom, but the space from this play to King Lear is measured in the shift from comedy to tragedy. It is also worth noticing that the first scenes of the play are also the most inventive. That is frequently the case in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, where he is often most spirited and emboldened at the beginning of each enterprise.

At court, the day after the performance of Measure for Measure, the Earl of Pembroke helped to assemble and present a masque with music entitled Juno and Hymenaeus. The text has not survived, but Pembroke may have obtained some assistance from the king’s leading dramatist. Then, on the next day, The Comedy of Errors was performed. This was followed on 7 January with Henry V. It was something of a Shakespeare festival, marked a day later by a special production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the London house of the Earl of Southampton. This was the play that seems to bear references to the Southampton coterie or “circle” which in previous years had included some of the king’s most fervent supporters. Sir Walter Cope, the Chamberlain of the Exchequer, wrote to Robert Cecil earlier in the month that

I have sent and bene all thys morning huntyng for players Juglers & Such kinde of Creaturs, but fynde them harde to finde, wherfore Leavinge notes for them to seeke me, Burbage ys come, & Sayes ther ys no new playe that the queen hath not seene, but they have Revyved an olde one, Cawled Loves Labore Lost, which for wytte & mirthe he sayes will please her exceedingly. And Thys ys appointed to be playd to Morowe night at my Lord of Sowthamptons … Burbage ys my messenger Ready attending your pleasure.⁵

“Burbage” here is likely to be Cuthbert rather than Richard. It is highly unlikely that the leading tragedian of the day would be employed as a “messenger” between two servants of the state, although the association of players with “Juglers & Such kinde of Creaturs” shows little respect for the social standing of the theatrical profession.

The epistle is interesting for the fact that it also marks a definite occasion when Shakespeare’s “old” plays can be enumerated. We can calculate that in the last two years he had written Othello and Measure for Measure, and that in the succeeding nine years he would write twelve more plays. It is sometimes assumed that this represents a general or gentle decline in his production of new drama as a result of age or debility but, on the assumption that he began his playwriting career in 1586 or 1587, then the rate of composition remains approximately the same throughout his life. The fact that the plays to be written include King Lear, Macbeth and The Tempest is clear enough proof that there was no loss of power.

The performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost in the second week of January was noted by Dudley Carleton when he remarked that “It seems we shall have Christmas all the yeare and therefore I shall never be owt of matter. The last nights revels were kept at my Lord of Cranbornes … and the like two nights before at my Lord of Southamptons.”⁶ Then, in the following month, there were two performances of The Merchant of Venice. No contemporary dramatist had ever been so honoured by the ruling family. In this year, too, the fourth quarto of Richard III was published; the play was still successful almost fifteen years after its first performance.

Another play, of curious construction and tone, seems to date from this period. All’s Well That Ends Well is generally considered to be a comedy, but it is one dressed in sombre hues. The plot of the infatuated orphan, Helena, pursuing the fatuous and disdainful Count Bertram is not the most edifying; it might almost be a sourly dramatic version of the relationship between the lover and the beloved proposed in the sonnets, with the “lascivious” Bertram as an image of the “Lasciuious grace” of the poems’ recipient. When Helena writes a letter, it takes the form of a sonnet. But the play does have a redeeming character in the portrayal of the elderly Countess of Rossillion, described by George Bernard Shaw as “the most beautiful old woman’s part ever written.” A certain unevenness of tone in the writing prompted Coleridge to speculate that the play “was written at two different, and rather distinct periods of the poet’s life,”⁷ and it used to be believed that it was a rewriting of the early play Loue labours wonne attributed to Shakespeare. Yet it is best to accept the play as a complete and coherent achievement.

Shakespeare adopted the plot from an anthology of stories, William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, but the original or parent source is Boccaccio’s Decameron. This was a book from which Chaucer also purloined some of his plots. Shakespeare intensified the action while at the same time introducing riddling complications that display his sheer love of invention. He provides plots and sub-plots that work in parallel, and in part parody one another. He creates patterns of imagery that are like the shadows of paper-lace upon a wall. He has also invented the character of Parolles, the military braggart, a creature of prolific and meaningless words who can now be firmly identified as a Shakespearian “type.” Shakespeare loved those who dwelled in a wilderness of words.

It is a difficult play in the sense that in characteristic fashion Shakespeare conflates several disparate elements, with the folk tale vying with realistic comedy and the elements of fable coexisting with the elements of farce. The verse itself is often very difficult, with meaning wrestling against syntax and cadence. Helena laments “the poorer borne,” for example (182-5),

Whose baser starres do shut vs vp in wishes,

Might with effects of them follow our friends,

And shew what we alone must thinke, which neuer

Returnes vs thankes.

It is a demanding poetry once more recalling that of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Donne. It is even possible that there was in this period a fashion for difficult poetry, which Shakespeare mastered just as he mastered every other form. It is a difficult play but it is also a dry play, an abortive exercise in comic form. We do not need to suppose any great crisis in Shakespeare’s creative or personal life, as some biographers have suggested, in order to explain this loss of power. A dark thought took wing into a dark valley which, once thoroughly investigated, proved barren and boring. That is all.

CHAPTER 78. The Bitter Disposition of the Time

On 24 July, 1605, Shakespeare invested £440 in tithes or, as the official document states, “one half of all tythes of corne and grayne aryseing within the townes villages and fieldes of Old Stratford, Byshopton and Welcombe” as well as “half of all tythes of wooll and lambe, and of all small and privy tythes.”¹ A tithe had originally been a tenth part of the produce from the land, paid by farmer or tenant to the Church; this archaic form of tribute had then been passed to the Stratford Corporation at the time of the Reformation. Shakespeare was leasing his tithes from the corporation for a period of thirty-one years. At this late date it sounds a complicated matter, but at the time it was a conventional and familiar way of securing a reasonable income. The sum laid out by Shakespeare was in fact a very large one, and he could not raise the whole amount at one time; a year later he still owed some £20 to the vendor, Ralph Hubaud. He expected an annual return on his investment of something like £60, which was in itself a reasonable income. There were, however, one or two additional costs. He collected the tithes but was obliged to pay an annual fee of £17 to the Corporation of Stratford for the privilege. Nevertheless he still gathered a large amount.

The fact that his tithe lease ran for thirty-one years is evidence that he was intent upon securing his family’s future after his death. It was a question of social, as well as financial, status. As the owner of tithes he was classified as a “lay rector,” and had earned the right to be buried within the rails of the chancel of Stratford Church; it was a right that was taken up at his behest or on his behalf. Meanwhile his purchase of New Place had given him the right to a reserved pew in the church. He seems always to have been concerned about his precise social standing in his old town. It was in this period, too, that he rented out the eastern part of the family house in Henley Street to brewers by the name of Hiccox.

The transaction concerning the tithes was witnessed by two friends who would at a later date be named in his will, Anthony Nash of Welcombe and the lawyer Francis Collins. It is a mark of the invisibility of Shakespeare’s Stratford life that little is known of these gentlemen, who played an intimate and familiar part in the dramatist’s commercial affairs. They were part of a world very different from that of the players and playgoers, but he was equally at home in their company.

His prosperity did not go unremarked and in a fictional “biography” published this year of a notorious highwayman, Gamaliel Ratsey, there are references to actors who “are grown so wealthy that they have expected to be knighted, or at least to be cojunct in authority and to sit with men of great worship.” There is also a clear allusion to Shakespeare in the remark that “thou shalt learne to be frugall … to make thy hand a stranger to thy pocket… 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.”² The anonymous writer goes on to say that “I haue heard indeede, of some that haue gone to London very meanly, and haue come in time to be exceeding wealthy.” This fits Shakespeare’s case exactly. The little volume seems to have been written by someone who knew of Shakespeare’s affairs, and it is interesting that he should emphasise the dramatist’s obvious thrift as well as his success.

The wealthy player is described as “weary of playing,” too, which confirms the evidence that Shakespeare had retired from the stage by 1603 or 1604. The purchase of tithes, as we have seen, ensured that he had an annual and independent income larger than that of a player. It is doubly unlikely, then, that he was on tour with the King’s Men in autumn and winter of this year. They were travelling again out of necessity, since a new onset of the plague meant that the theatres were closed from the middle of October to the middle of December. Among the plays they took with them were Othello and Measure for Measure as well as Ben Jonson’s Volpone. They seem to have travelled as far west as Barnstaple, taking in Oxford and Saffron Walden enroute, and may indeed have stayed in the provinces until the Globe was reopened on 15 December. Just eleven days later, they performed before the king.

They were playing in uncertain times, and to a king who was reported to be in a state of alarm and anxiety. In early November the conspiracy popularly known as the “Gunpowder Plot” was revealed to the world, with its ambitious and unprecedented attempt to blow up king and Parliament. It led to renewed suspicion and persecution of Roman Catholics, of course, nowhere more fiercely than in Stratford and Warwickshire. The leading conspirator, Robert Catesby, was a Warwickshire man. The conspirators met in that county, and one of them had even rented Clopton House just outside Stratford to be close to his colleagues. In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of 5 November the bailiff of Stratford seized a cloak-bag “full of copes, vestments, crosses, crucifixes, chalices and other massing relics.” It was supposed “to be delivered to one George Badger there.”³ George Badger was the woollen-draper who lived next door to the Shakespeares in Henley Street. Shakespeare knew him very well indeed, and would have quickly been informed by his family of the calamity that had fallen upon him.

New legislation was passed by the Parliament against Catholic recusants, and the king himself, according to the Venetian ambassador, declared: “I shall most certainly be obliged to stain my hands with their blood, though sorely against my will …”⁴ For the Shakespeare family in Stratford, it was an uncertain time. In the spring of the following year, Susannah Shakespeare was cited for her failure to receive holy communion that Easter. She is listed with some well-known Catholic recusants in the town, among them Shakespeare’s old friend Hamnet Sadler — the godfather of his dead son. The danger of her position must have been emphasised to her by someone close to her, since the word “dismissa” was later placed against her entry. She must have outwardly conformed by taking communion. Three years later, however, Richard Shakespeare, the dramatist’s brother, was taken before the bawdry court at Stratford for some unspecified offence; he was fined 12 pence, for the use of the Stratford poor, which suggests that he was found guilty of breaking the Sabbath.

The response of Shakespeare to the turbulent events of 1605 was to write a play of apparently conservative and orthodox intent. Macbeth was concerned with the terrible consequences of murdering a divinely appointed sovereign, and within the drama itself there are even references to the trials of the conspirators in the spring of 1606. There are allusions to “equivocation,” a concept which appeared at the trial of the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet, who was subsequently hanged. When Lady Macduff remarks, on the subject of treason, “every one that do’s so, is a Traitor, and must be hang’d”(1512) there may have been applause and cheers among the audience of the Globe. In Macbeth, too, there is an invocation of the Stuart dynasty, with reference to the kings who will rule England as well as Scotland. Since the play is also steeped in King James’s favourite subject, witchcraft, there can be no doubt that it was purposefully designed to appeal to the new monarch. The witches of Macbeth can be said to plot against the lawful king, with their intimations of Macbeth’s greatness, and just fifteen years previously some Scottish witches had been tried for conspiring against James himself. The parallel is clear. In the previous year, too, King James had been greeted by three sibyls at the gates of an Oxford college and hailed as the true descendant of Banquo. That is no doubt why Shakespeare, in direct contrast with the source, refuses to connect Banquo with the Macbeths’ plot against Duncan. Shakespeare was adapting James’s own suppositions and beliefs into memorable theatre. He was in a sense sanctifying them and turning them into myth.

Yet Shakespeare wrote with only one eye upon the king. Macbeth was also designed to entertain everyone else. It ushers on to the stage ghosts as well as bloodshed and magic. What could be more appealing to an early seventeenth-century audience than royalty and mystery combined? The scene at the banquet, in which Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth, mightily impressed itself upon Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It is a play that acquired an almost Celtic sense of doom and the supernatural. That is why actors refuse to name it Macbeth, but to this day continue to call it “the Scottish play.” It is as if Shakespeare, deep in his Scottish sources, was possessed by a new form of imagination; it is a tribute to his extraordinary sensitivity and to his unconscious powers of assimilation.

Macbeth is one of the shortest plays that Shakespeare ever wrote — in fact only The Comedy of Errors is shorter — and has a playing time of approximately two hours. It is also remarkably free of oaths and profanities, as a result of a measure passed by Parliament in March 1603; a parliamentary act to “restrain the abuses of players” forbade irreverence or blasphemy on the public stage. It has been suggested that the relative brevity of the play is an indication of the king’s span of attention, but this is unlikely. It may have been the result of cuts by the Master of the Revels. More likely, however, is that the play itself demanded this length. The intensity and concentration of the fatal action require a series of drumbeats. Although the slight ambiguity in the respective roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth suggests that Shakespeare may have begun the play without knowing which of them would kill the king, there is a consistency of effect. The verse is shaped and pared down so that it becomes echoic; it is almost relentless in its pace, and there are images throughout of rushing action. “Time” is mentioned on forty-four occasions. There are no puns, and only one “comic” scene in which the Porter responds to the knocking at the gate; it is hardly comic, however, since the Porter is modelled upon the keeper of Hell’s gates and the elaborate references in the Porter’s monologue to the details of the recent conspiracy are pervaded by a chilling gallows’ humour.

The Porter is indeed an image of the Hell Porter in the mystery plays, and it has been well observed that the banqueting scene in the play is related to the scene of feasting in that part of the mystery cycle entitled “The Death of Herod.” The death and doom of the ancient plays survive in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, as another layer of darkness and supernatural fear. Shakespeare is much more concerned with the ancient forces of the earth than with the omens of the sky. Macbeth is a poem of the night. Yet, in any discussion of Macbeth himself, the concept of darkness is not required. He is the most vital and energetic character within the play, a natural force, surpassing any conventional notion of good and evil. He partakes of the sublime. Like many of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, he seems actively to seek out his fate.

Since the play is mentioned in a production by the Children of St. Paul’s in early July 1606, it must have been performed at the Globe before that date. So Macbeth was played during the season that ran from Easter on 21 April until the middle of July, when once more the playhouses were closed as a result of the plague. The King’s Men remained in the neighbourhood of London for a short period, however, in order to entertain King Christian of Denmark, who was the brother-in-law of James; he remained in England from 15 July to 11 August, and Heminges was paid for “three playes before his Majestie and the kinge of Denmarke at Greenwich and Hampton Court.” It has plausibly been asserted that one of these plays was Macbeth, performed before the royal parties in the early days of August.

It is not at all clear, however, that King Christian and his hosts attended to the great drama. The Danish king was a heavy drinker, who on one evening was carried out of the entertainments in a state of insensibility. Everyone seemed to follow his example, according to Sir John Harington, and the English nobles “wallow in beastly delights” while their ladies “roll in intoxication.” He added that “I ne’er did see such lack of good order, discretion and sobriety. The Gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads …”⁵ The men fell down and the women were sick, an apt token of the change that had taken place since the days of Elizabeth. If it was a new society, it was not necessarily a more decorous one.

After their royal performances the King’s Men began a season of touring in Kent, where they played at Dover, Maidstone and Faversham. They also journeyed to Saffron Walden, Leicester, Oxford, and Marlborough. It is tempting to believe that Shakespeare was with them when they visited Dover, at the beginning of October, if only because of the important presence of that town in his next play. But such explicit connections are dangerous. There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare travelled with them, and every reason to believe that he was engaged elsewhere. In the course of this year, after all, he completed the writing of King Lear.

CHAPTER 79. Oh You Go farre

There is ample evidence for the first performance of King Lear at the court on 26 December 1606. On the title page of the first quarto publication, it is announced that “yt was played before the Kinges Maiestie at Whitehall vppon St. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes.” The title page is also singular for the name of “Mr. William Shakspeare” blazoned across the top in type larger than the rest. It is a clear sign of his eminence and what a later age would call “name recognition.” It was also a way of distinguishing this play from the old King Leir published in 1605.

There were clear associations with Macbeth, the play composed immediately before it. Both dramas were concerned with what might be called the mythological history of Britain, but both have some contemporary import. The folly of Lear’s division of his kingdom had been amply demonstrated, in a period when King James was intent upon unifying the separate kingdoms of Scotland and England into the one realm of Great Britain. In the third act the word “English” had been substituted by “Brittish.” King James had warned his son, in Basilikon Doron, that “by deuiding your kingdoms, yee shall leaue the seed of diuision and discord among your posteritie.”King Lear might be described as a meditation upon that theme. A political decision is once more lent a theatrical and even mythological dimension. In Lear, as in Macbeth, there are invocations of the medieval mystery cycle. Lear becomes the sacred figure who is mocked and buffeted. The use of British mythology once more prompted Shakespeare into calling up the powers of ancient drama. He was aiming for a total theatrical effect. If the regality of Lear was emphasised upon the stage, perhaps by the wearing of a crown, then his innate authority would have been sustained by James’s own assertion of divine right. It renders Lear’s decline and fall all the more fearful for a contemporaneous audience. The spectator must be thoroughly possessed by the idea of sacred kingship fully to appreciate the play.

The casting can in part be reconstructed. Richard Burbage excelled as Lear, and indeed it was reported that the old king “lived in him.” Robert Armin played the Fool, and perhaps Cordelia. It seems to be a strange “doubling” but it would explain the fact that the Fool mysteriously disappears at the end of the third act, at which point Cordelia emerges. The idea of Cordelia played by a comic actor, however, does not suit modern taste. It is easier to imagine a boy in the part. We may also envisage Burbage and Armin upon the stage, contesting against the storm — or, rather, fighting to be heard against the noise of kettle-drums, squibs, and cannon balls being rolled in metal trays.

The young Shakespeare may have acted in an early production of the old play of King Leir. It has been suggested that the first King Leir was part of his own juvenile work, but it is more probable that he recalled his youthful involvement in it and then completely rewrote it for the King’s Men. In preparation he read Holinshed and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. He must also have been reading Florio’s translation of Montaigne, since one hundred new words in that volume re-emerge in King Lear. He was immensely susceptible to the sound and rhythm of words, to the extent that after first encountering them he could effortlessly reduplicate them.

He also read an account of some spiritual malpractice by Jesuit priests in Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures. It was an account that had some resonance after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, but for Shakespeare it had a specific interest. Among the Jesuit priests, who were accused of feigning ceremonies of exorcism on some impressionable chambermaids, were Thomas Cottam and Robert Debdale. Cottam was the brother of the Stratford schoolmaster, John Cottam, to whom, many years before, Shakespeare probably owed his introduction to the Lancastrian recusant families of Hoghton Tower and Rufford Hall. Robert Debdale had been a neighbour of the Hathaways at Shottery and, being of an age with Shakespeare, may well have attended the Stratford school with him. So it is likely that Shakespeare turned to Harsnett’s account for news of his contemporaries, and only by accident or indirection discovered material that would be of use in King Lear.

We may picture his mind and imagination as a vast assimilator, picking up trifles that were later polished until they glowed. He incorporates so many disparate elements, and conflates so many inconsistent sources, that it is impossible to gauge what attitude he takes towards the unfolding drama of King Lear. He is so absorbed by the matter to hand that there is neither opportunity nor occasion to dispense judgement except of the most blatant theatrical kind. The drama has no ultimate “meaning.” In a play filled with rage and death, this may be the hardest lesson of all. Yet it may contain redemption. To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning to life and that there are limits to human understanding. So we lay down a heavy burden and are made humble. That is what Shakespearian tragedy accomplishes for us.

We glimpse here the insistent and instinctive patterns of his imagination that have nothing to do with homilies or sermons. He moved forward quickly with chiming words and themes, parallel phrases and situations, contrasting characters and events, working out their destinies. He improvised; he was surprised by his characters. He picked material from anywhere and everywhere. The feigning of madness by “poor Tom,” for example, is amplified by allusions to Samuel Harsnett’s account of apparent diabolic possession; in front of large crowds the Jesuit priests summoned forth various unclean spirits from the bodies of the women. Shakespeare uses the names of the devils that were invoked on this occasion. He also borrows the language of possession. It was a way of intimating that Tom’s madness is feigned, just as the Jesuit priests are engaged in what Harsnett describes as “the feat of juggling and deluding the people by counterfeit miracles.” But is there not some deeper connection between the theatre and these rites of exorcism, in front of an awed and astonished crowd? It is as if the “mimic superstition” of the papists was somehow replicated or complemented by the illusions of the playhouse. The invocation of Roman Catholic superstition, far from lancing Tom’s folly, somehow increases the sacredness of Lear’s terror. It may also have led Shakespeare to contemplate the nature of illusion itself. Even when the powers of the Jesuit priests are feigned, they seem to be effective.

That is why many scholars have deemed King Lear to be a mystery play in all but name, an echo of Catholic ritual satisfying the liturgical and iconographic hunger of those who professed the old religion. The desire for ceremony mony outlives the faith that first employed it. In fact there may be grace and redemption in the ceremony itself. It is certainly true that in 1609 and 1610 a group of Catholic actors performed King Lear in various sympathetic houses in Yorkshire. It would be absurd to suggest that this was a deliberate strategy on Shakespeare’s part. It is more likely that the forces of his nature comprehended sacred, as well as secular, realities and that this reversion to old imagery was wholly instinctive.

There is another possible “source” for the play. An old courtier and “Gentleman Pensioner,” Brian Annesley, was suffering from senility. Two of his daughters wished him to be declared insane, and thus “altogether unfit to govern himself or his estate.”¹ But a third daughter, by the name of Cordell or Cordelia, pleaded on her father’s behalf to Lord Cecil. After her father’s death in the summer of 1604, in fact, Cordell inherited most of his property. Cordell Annesley then went on to marry Sir William Harvey, Southampton’s stepfather. The case was well known, even beyond the Southampton circle, and indeed it may have prompted the revival of the old version of King Leir in 1605. It was a common enough occurrence for a contemporary sensation to be staged in the playhouses. It could have been performed by the Queen’s Men at the Red Bull, for example, a playhouse that had been built in 1605 for just such popular or populist drama with what Thomas Dekker called its “unlettered” audience “of porters and carters.”²

But King Lear leaves its sources far behind. Shakespeare removes the Christian allusions of the earlier drama, and gives it a thoroughly pagan atmosphere. This is a play in which the gods have turned silent. Shakespeare also strips away the romance elements, and fashions his plot out of disloyalty and ingratitude. The happy finale of the original King Leir, for example, is abandoned here for the numinous and tragic end of the protagonists. He invented the death of Cordelia cradled in her father’s arms, a scene not to be found in any of the sources. The unremitting horror of that conclusion has prompted one eminent critic, Frank Kermode, to postulate the play’s “unsparing cruelty” and “an almost sadistic attitude to the spectator.”³ Certainly the death of Cordelia would have come as an unhappy surprise to anyone acquainted only with the old play. King Lear is deeper and darker than any presumed original, with the forces of transcendence somewhere at work within it.

There are images throughout the play of the human body being wracked and tortured, as if Shakespeare were invoking the image of the Divine Human torn and dismembered. By slow degrees the wheel is turned, and all is thrown into agony and confusion. The play also elicits some of Shakespeare’s most enduring preoccupations, particularly that of the father and daughter. The family, and conflict within the family, are the bases of the play itself. Indeed the family is at the centre of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy; more than any other contemporary dramatist he is concerned with familial conflict. The action of King Lear itself exists only within the context of domestic hostility and rage. Lear and Cordelia are reunited, if not necessarily reconciled, and anticipate the family reunions of the later plays where in particular father and daughter achieve a living harmony — whether it be Pericles and Marina, Leontes and Perdita, Prospero and Miranda, Cymbeline and Imogen. The Latinate sonority of the daughters’ names suggests, too, that they are in part formal or primal figures of filial love. In the earlier plays, by contrast, fathers and daughters are at odds — Capulet and Juliet, Shylock and Jessica, Leonato and Hero, Brabantio and Desdemona, Egeus and Hermia, Baptista and Katherina, are the most prominent examples. It is a pattern too persistent to be altogether neglected. In the late plays, when Shakespeare himself was reaching the end of his life, an ageing father is reunited with a long-absent daughter; there may be feelings of guilt and shame associated with this absence, but all is forgiven. There are rarely mothers and daughters in Shakespeare’s plays. The essential bond is father and daughter. It may not be the pattern of his life, but it is clearly the pattern of his imagination.

There is another aspect of his dramaturgy that generally goes unremarked. In modern drama the accepted context is one of naturalism, which certain playwrights then work up into formality or ritual. In the early seventeenth century the essential context was one of ritualism and formality, to which Shakespeare might then add touches of realism or naturalism. We must reverse all modern expectations, therefore, if we are properly to comprehend King Lear.

There are many differences between the quarto and the folio editions of the play, to such an extent that the authoritative Oxford collection of Shakespeare’s drama prints two separate versions as if they were indeed two distinct plays. The quarto play was entitled The History of King Lear, and the folio play The Tragedy of King Lear. It seems that the first version was revised some five years after it was performed, and at that stage the newly fashionable act and scene divisions were introduced. The late folio omits three hundred lines of the early quarto, and adds a further one hundred “new”lines. In the quarto version there is a clear indication that Cordelia is leading a French army on English soil, where in the folio version the emphasis is upon domestic rather than foreign imbroglios. Cordelia is a stronger presence in the quarto than in the folio.

Since certain of the omitted lines reveal the presence of a French army on English soil, they may have been removed at the behest of the Master of the Revels. But it is much more likely that Shakespeare was responding to dramatic imperatives; the earlier version did not sufficiently isolate and clarify the figure of Lear. It scattered interest and effect, which could more usefully be focused upon the single tragic individual. It is the difference, perhaps, between the “history” and the “tragedy” on the respective title-pages. The later version is a more concise and more concentrated play, with greater attention to the pace of the action. The hundreds of minor changes between the two versions, compatible with a rewriting at speed by a dramatist absorbed in his work, also reveal the work of a thoroughly dramatic imagination, intent upon wholly theatrical effects. They prove beyond any possible doubt that Shakespeare was not averse to extensive revision and rewriting of his material, when occasion demanded it. His was always a work in progress.

CHAPTER 80. My Life Hath in This Line Some Interest

Shakespeare had returned to Stratford by the summer of 1607, at the very latest, in order to attend the marriage of his oldest daughter. Susannah Shakespeare, named as a recusant in the previous year, had now outwardly conformed; this may have been to facilitate the wedding itself. In any case she was marrying a man of Puritan belief, John Hall, so there was no great religious prejudice in the family itself.

On 5 June William Shakespeare processed with his family to the church where at the altar, in ritual fashion, he relinquished his daughter to her new husband. In the marriage settlement he had promised them the 127 acres of Old Stratford he had purchased from the Combes five years before. There is every reason to suppose that Susannah was his favourite child. Certainly she was singled out in his will for preferential treatment. She may in fact have inherited something of his spirit, and was described on her tombstone as being “Witty above her sexe” and “Wise to salvation.” The memorialist added that “something of Shakespeare was in that,” so at the time she must have been recognised as in some ways resembling her father. She could also sign her own name, a skill which her sister Judith did not possess.

Her spouse, John Hall, was a doctor. Since in his later drama Shakespeare himself displays the utmost respect for doctors, the union no doubt had his blessing. The bridegroom was only eleven years younger than Shakespeare himself, and so Susannah was marrying a figure of some authority not unlike her father. He had been born in Bedfordshire, and had attended Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. He had travelled in France for a period, and had set up practice at Stratford some years before his betrothal. The newly married couple lived in New Place for a period after the wedding, but it is possible that they soon purchased a house a few hundred yards away in the area designated on the maps as “Old Town.” A timber-framed house of the period still survives, and has become known as “Hall’s Croft.” But the Halls returned to New Place after Shakespeare’s death.

Hall became a confidant of Shakespeare, travelling with him to London on occasions, and “proving” his father-in-law’s will. He kept a medical diary or case-book, which was published after his death with the somewhat exotic title of Select Observations on English Bodies. Here we find evidence that Doctor Hall tended his own family. When Susannah was suffering from the torments of the colic, for example, “I appointed to inject a Pint of Sack made hot. This presently brought forth a great deal of Wind, and freed her from all Pain.” In her youth their daughter, Elizabeth, suffered serious spasmodic pain. Her father rubbed spices into her back, and massaged her head with almond oil until she was “delivered from Death.” Hall believed in herbal cures, in other words, and treated other patients with pearl, powder of leaf gold and other precious minerals. He used emetics and purgatives to good effect. One happy patient wrote that “In regard I kno by experience: that hee is most excellent In that arte.”¹ It can be supposed that he also treated his father-in-law, in Shakespeare’s declining years, although no record of his ministrations has been recovered.

It is interesting, however, that in his previous plays Shakespeare had used the language and terminology of what might be called folk medicine, with allusions to wormwood and ratsbane, syrup and balsam, but from the time of his friendship with his son-in-law he introduced a more exotic range of medicines such as hebenon and coloquintida, mallow and mandragora. In All’s Well That Ends Well writes of the fistula and alludes to Galen and Paracelsus; in Pericles the doctor, Cerimon, revives Thaisa with “the blest infusions that dwels in Vegetiues, in Mettals, Stones”(1239-40). It is hard to escape the conclusion that his interest in such matters was quickened by his son-in-law’s successful remedies. When in Troilus and Cressida Thersites recites a list of maladies, including cold palsies and sciatica, he might have been reading from Dr. Hall’s case-book.

There is also proof in this case-book that Hall as by no means an extreme Puritan. He successfully treated a Catholic priest and noted that “beyond all expectation the Catholicke was cured,” adding in Latin “Deo gratias.” We may imagine him to have been a moderate Puritan, married to a recusant and therefore content to overlook religious differences.

There were other births and deaths in the immediate Shakespeare family. The register of St. Leonard’s Shoreditch records the birth, on 12 July 1607, of “Edward Shakesbye, the sonne of Edward Shakesbye, was baptised the same day — morefilds.” The fact that he was baptised on the same day as his birth suggests that there was some urgency about the matter, and indeed a month later the baby died. On 12 August he was buried in St. Giles Cripplegate, where the register duly notes “Edward sonne of Edward Shackspeere, Playenbase-borne.” The infant was the son of Shakespeare’s younger brother. The name “Edward” in the church registers is a transcription error for “Edmund,” and is a common enough confusion in documents of the period; the mistake was prompted by the unfortunate child’s own name.

So we can deduce that Edmund Shakespeare had travelled to London and had taken up the profession of “Player,” imitating the career of his famous brother. Whether he had taken up the profession on his brother’s advice, or whether he had simply followed his example, is not known. The fact that his son was baptised in Shoreditch and buried in Cripplegate must mean that Edmund was living in the northern suburbs, and that he was probably playing at the Curtain Theatre. He was living very close to Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street, in fact, and it is even possible that he shared them with him. There is no official record of his marriage, so he had also sired a bastard son. This was a not uncommon phenomenon in early seventeenth-century London but it does suggest that Edmund Shakespeare, now in his mid-twenties, was living a somewhat irregular existence as a player.

There are other domestic events to record. On 14 October 1607, in the parish church of Stratford, the son of Richard Tyler was baptised as “William”; it is possible that William Shakespeare was his godfather. Tyler, two years younger than Shakespeare, was a friend and neighbour of the dramatist. He was also no doubt at school with him. He was bequeathed a ring in the first draft of Shakespeare’s will. Richard Tyler was a prosperous yeoman and gentleman, living in Sheep Street, who had held civic office and had been elected as churchwarden. In an official document he is described as “a man of honest Conversacion & quiet & peacable Carryage amongst his neighbours & towards all people.”² Very little else is known about Tyler, but he may stand as representative of Shakespeare’s Stratford acquaintances. They were generally prosperous, some of them being tradesmen and some of them being, like Tyler, “gentlemen.” They were “honest” and “quiet” and “peacable,” very much the model of the English townsman of this period. And Shakespeare remained on affectionate terms with them all his life. It is hard not to suspect that they were comfortable and welcome company after the vivid and more excitable ambience of London. Shakespeare could relax with them, converse with them, drink with them, without the constant press of theatrical business. Four days after the baptism of little William Tyler in the parish church, Shakespeare’s nephew, Richard Hathaway, baker, was married at the same altar. If the laws of family life applied to the Shakespeares, then the dramatist would have been present for that occasion also.

These rituals were taking place in the immediate aftermath of great local disturbance. The “Midlands Rising” was punctuated by savage enclosure riots directed against the larger landowners. The problems were particularly acute in the Forest of Arden where the enclosers had “turn’d so much of woodland into tillage … that they produce corn to furnish other counties.” The ironworks in the region had also “destroyed prodigious quantities of wood,”³ and the old commons had been transformed into privately owned pasturage. No one denied that the land was the property of the landowner; the rioters were protesting against the overthrow of centuries of traditional usage. There was also anger and dismay at continuing food shortages, a dearth which in the popular mind was associated with the pace of enclosures.

The rising began on the eve of May Day and quickly spread throughout the Midland counties until it became a summer of insurrection. The king issued a royal proclamation deploring the fact that “many of the meanest sort of people have presumed lately to assemble themselves riotously in multitudes.”⁴ The rebellion was only halted after savagely repressive measures by the authorities; the military killed scores of protesters, and many of those captured were hanged, drawn and quartered. The problems were, almost literally, on Shakespeare’s doorstep and they entered at least one of his subsequent dramas.

In the winter season of this year, stretching from December 1607 to February 1608, the King’s Men staged thirteen plays at the court for the benefit of the royal family. The names of these plays have not been recorded, but it is a fair assumption that one of them was the drama entitled The Tragedie of Antony and Cleopatra. In Samuel Daniel’s verse drama Cleopatra, reissued in this year, there is a detailed and expressive description of the dying Antony being hoisted onto Cleopatra’s “monument.” This had not appeared in the earlier version of Daniel’s play, printed in 1594, and suggests that Daniel had witnessed a performance of Shakespeare’s scene in which, according to the stage-directions, “They heaue Antony aloft to Cleopatra.” It has all the marks of a visual, rather than a verbal, memory. Since the theatres were closed from July onwards by reason of the plague, the likelihood must be that Daniel saw the play at the Globe in the late spring or early summer of 1607. It was restaged that Christmas for the benefit of the sovereign.

It is possible, however, that the audiences of the time remained unmoved by Antony and Cleopatra. With the exception of the allusion by Samuel Daniel, there is no recorded comment on its production. It was not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime — and nor indeed was that other Roman drama, Coriolanus. If they had not been included in the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works, there would be no surviving text.

For Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch and from Horace, from Montaigne and from Pliny. It says something about the effect of the theatre and the permanence of theatrical memory that this doomed love between Antony and Cleopatra, together with the assassination of Julius Caesar, have become the two most famous episodes of Roman history. With the magniloquent verse of Antony and Cleopatra, in particular, Shakespeare has reinvented the last years of republican Rome. The language of passion and aspiration dominates this play. It valorises everything, with the billowing rhetoric of the Egyptians contrasted with the high Roman rhetoric of time and duty. It is the oration conceived as poem. By some unerring insight, too, he has divined the essential characteristics of the protagonists. Octavius Caesar here bears all the incipient greatness and ruthlessness of the ruler who would become Augustus, the first emperor in Roman history.

Shakespeare’s imagination seems to have been stirred by the vastness of the enterprise he is enacting; there are images of the world and of immensity, with the main protagonists in the early stage of becoming deities. Antony and Cleopatra could have echoed the emperor Vespasian’s words upon his death-bed, “I am afraid I am turning into a god.” But they embrace that fate; they long for metamorphosis. No play has so wide a stage, with so many scenes and with so many messengers from the boundaries of the known world — except that there are no boundaries and no limits, in this evocation of immensity. It is a pageant, a moving tableau, a procession. That is why Antony and Cleopatra are intensely theatrical creations, admiring their images as if they had been projected by some conjuror upon a linen screen.

CHAPTER 81. That Strain Agen, It Had a Dying fall

On the last day of 1607, Edmund Shakespeare was buried. It was a time of almost unbearable cold. By the middle of December the Thames had frozen solid so that “many persons did walk halfway over the Thames upon the ice, and by the thirtieth of December the multitude … passed over the Thames in divers places.”¹ A small tent city sprang up on the ice, with wrestling bouts and football matches, barbers’ shops and eating-houses, trading upon the novelty of the silent and immobile river.

On 31 December Edmund Shakespeare was carried to the church on the southern bank of the Thames. The entry in the burial register of St. Saviour’s reads: “1607 December 31 Edmond Shakespeare, a player, in the Church.” And then a note by the sexton runs: “1607 December 31 Edmund Shakespeare, a player, buried in the church with a forenoon knell of the great bell, 20s.” The money for the bell no doubt came from the purse of his brother, who in the bitter cold accompanied the coffin to the burial place. It is possible, probable even, that Edmund died of the plague. He had followed his infant son within six months.

And then, in the spring of 1608, an entry in the Stationers’ Register records a play that, unlike Antony and Cleopatra, became hugely popular in Shakespeare’s lifetime. In the published version of 1609 Pericles is identified as “diuers and sundry times acted by his Maiesties Seruants at the Globe on the Banck-side.” So it must have been played at that theatre in the spring of the previous year, since the theatres were subsequently closed for eighteen months. The Venetian Ambassador took the French Ambassador to a performance, and a Venetian contemporary noted that “All the ambassadors who have come to England have gone to the play.”² One versifier compared large London crowds “of gentles mixed with grooms”³ with those who swarmed to see Pericles. Its edition in quarto was reprinted five times. It was quoted incessantly, and had the distinction of being dismissed by Ben Jonson as a “mouldy tale.”⁴ It was, of course, more successful than anything Jonson himself had ever written.

There is some disagreement over the form and nature of Pericles as well as the other late plays which share an abiding interest in music and spectacle. A convenient term is that of romance, since in this period there was a revival of what might be described as the cult of romance. The king’s oldest son, Henry, was being compared with the legendary Arthur; this in turn inspired a new fashion for chivalry and legendary adventure on the pattern of Malory and Spenser. This was not of course a sufficient condition for the creation of Pericles, but it is a contributing factor. There was also a tradition of stage plays taken from medieval gestes, but the medieval context of Pericles is wider than that of knights and battles.

It is often suggested that Shakespeare had entered an “experimental” phase with Pericles and subsequent plays, but he himself would not have recognised or understood the term. It would also be a mistake to impose upon him principles or standards which a later generation would describe as “aesthetic.” He did not have an aesthetic view of the drama at all, but a practical and empirical one. Pericles is an example. It is a play of extremities, of foul and fair closely joined. The most lubricious and bawdy prose is placed beside some of Shakespeare’s most plangent verse, so that all seems to cohere as if by miracle. The great dirge to the sea deeps gives way to an image of prostitutes that “with continuall action, are euen as good as rotten”(1532-3).

The play attests in particular to Shakespeare’s long affection for the religious plays of his childhood. The last mystery cycle was played in Coventry as late as 1579, well within the purview of the young Shakespeare. It is not necessary that he should have seen the mystery plays — although in the course of a Stratford boyhood it is likely that he did — only that he should have come from a culture in which they played a central role. They were part of the spirit of place.

Such paradigmatic events as “the Agony” and “the Betrayal” are redeployed in a number of Shakespeare’s plays, and Pericles in particular inhabits a world of vision and of supernatural intervention, where the spiritualised hero must endure much suffering before being blessed. The visitation of the goddess Diana here replaces the more usual appearance of the Virgin Mary, but the meaning is the same. Indeed the play of St. Mary Magdalene to be found in the Digby Manuscript bears many parallels with Shakespeare’s drama, including the birth of a child at sea during a storm, and the miraculous restoration of the unhappy mother. It is a matter of record that the Catholic players who had performed in the recusant households of Yorkshire included Pericles in their repertoire, and that the play was also included in a booklist belonging to the English Jesuit College at St. Omer in France.⁵ It must have been deeply congenial to the adherents of the old religion.

Shakespeare seems deliberately to re-create the tone and atmosphere of the early medieval romances, too, on the very good and practical grounds that they could still have a startling effect upon their spectators. Longinus wrote of the Odyssey, “Homer shows that, as genius ebbs, it is the love of romance that characterises old age.”⁶ The Shakespearian romances may be an indication of advancing age but not of ebbing inspiration. His late plays are unique in the history of Elizabethan drama. With their combination of music, spectacle and vision, they fulfil all the conditions of older drama while at the same time providing a wholly contemporaneous interest in narrative and adventure. The medieval atmosphere of Pericles is in fact deliberately created with the appearance of the fourteenth-century poet John Gower as Chorus, at the beginning of every act. Gower’s Chorus lends the play the form of ritual, exactly the effect that was intended. Ritual is another element involved in the enchanted atmosphere of romance.

After Shakespeare’s death his fellow actors excluded Pericles from the Folio edition of his works in 1623. They seem to have taken the view that it was in part a collaboration and therefore did not fit an attribution to William Shakespeare. Most historians and textual scholars agree that much of the play was written by a second playwright, but there are also scenes and passages that are undoubtedly and authentically composed by Shakespeare. The identity of the second dramatist has been a matter of speculation, but one candidate emerges above all others. At some point in 1608 a playwright in his mid-thirties, George Wilkins, published a novelisation of the play entitled The Painfull Aduentures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. The novel is so close to the play, and is so intimate with its structure, that it has generally been agreed that Wilkins himself collaborated with Shakespeare in the composition of the drama. Wilkins was writing his novel from memory, his “foul papers” being now in the possession of the King’s Men, and it is likely that the play proved so popular in the spring months of 1608 that Wilkins rushed into publication during the period when the playhouses were closed once more.

In the years between 1604 and 1608 Wilkins wrote other works of a popular nature, among them plays and prose narratives. The King’s Men had performed his The Miseries of Inforst Mariage in the year before, so the connection between him and Shakespeare was already there. Wilkins wrote the first sections of Pericles, and parts of the other acts, while Shakespeare wrote the rest. It should also be noted here, given the fact that Pericles has often been considered to be a “Catholic” play, that Wilkins himself adhered to the old faith.

It might be wondered why the older and much more famous dramatist would condescend to work with a tyro. But Shakespeare was a man of the theatre. He was competent and practical, no doubt ready to work with anyone for the good of the company. It is not at all likely that the collaborators sat down together with their principal sources, Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Laurence Twine’s The Patterne of Painefulle Aduentures, before sharing out the plot of Pericles. It is much more likely that Wilkins suggested the idea of the play and himself devised the plot. His earlier venture with the King’s Men had been relatively successful, and he was already trying his hand at prose romances. The company might have considered him to be a promising dramatist. After essaying a first version of Pericles, however, he may have discovered himself to be unequal to the task. He may have been in trouble with the authorities, or even briefly imprisoned. He may simply have run out of invention. So the work was handed to Shakespeare for completion. Shakespeare could on occasions act as a superior “play doctor” bringing together all the themes and strands of a plot. His imagination seems, in fact, to have been quickened by the last sections of Pericles, in which the restoration of Marina and the resolution of family loss are the important motifs. He added significantly to these scenes, and tended to leave the earlier stage business as it was. Since the play was extraordinarily popular, he made the right decision.

The prospect of Wilkins being arrested or imprisoned is no biographical fantasy. George Wilkins was a tavern-keeper and brothel-owner whose establishment was on the corner of Turnmill Street and Cow Cross Street. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the site is still that of a flourishing public house. Wilkins had a reputation for violence and was regularly cited in the proceedings of Middlesex sessions court, particularly for assaults against the young female prostitutes whom he employed. He was accused, for example, of “kikkinge a woman on the Belly which was then greate with childe.”⁷ One of the guarantors of Wilkins on this occasion was Henry Gosson, of St. Lawrence Pountney; it was Gosson who issued the play of Pericles in quarto form. It seems probable that Wilkins obtained the play for him from the King’s Men. Since he had written much of it, he may have had some claim to proprietorship. It might be added that, at a later date, Wilkins was convicted of being a thief and of harbouring criminals in his inn.

Shakespeare may also have been acquainted with Wilkins’s father, a poet and well-known Londoner, who had died of the plague five years before. But it is also likely that Shakespeare encountered Wilkins through the agency of the Mountjoys; when the daughter of the house married one of the apprentices, Stephen Belott, the young couple became tenants of Wilkins at his inn on the corner of Turnmill Street. Belott himself had been well acquainted with Wilkins, and had eaten meals at his establishment. It was the most notorious of all London quarters, filled with brothels and cheap taverns, but it was also one of the most interesting. This was the world in which Shakespeare encountered his collaborator. It is not unusual to find Shakespeare in what might be called “low” company — he has been discovered before with the landladies of Southwark in an affray — and it is not even occasion for surprise. Even when wealthy and successful, he fitted himself to any kind of society.