Shakespeare: The Biography

CHAPTER 82. As in a Theatre the Eies of Men

Since the doors of the playhouses were shut for eighteen months, from the summer of 1608, it may seem a strange time for the King’s Men to be engaged in a very expensive theatrical speculation. Nevertheless at the beginning of August 1608, just when the theatres had closed down, Shakespeare and six of his colleagues leased the Blackfriars Theatre for a period of twenty-one years. The Children of the Chapel Royal had been disbanded, after a particularly contentious production that had scandalised the French Ambassador, and so their venue was available for hire.

Each “sharer” among the King’s Men paid a seventh part of the annual rent of £40 to Cuthbert Burbage. There was also the cost of necessary repairs. Very little had been done during the last years of the childrens’ occupancy, and the playhouse “ran far into decay for want of reparations.”¹ It may have seemed a tempting prospect, but the King’s Men must also have had great faith in the long-term financial health of the London drama. It may be that they were also trying to circumvent the ban on public playing at a time of plague by using a “private” playhouse; there is a note of a reward from the king in January 1609 “for their private practise in the time of infeccon.”² This suggests that they did perform plays, under the cover that they were rehearsing for the court dramas of the Christmas season.

Their purchase is in any case a measure of the supremacy of the King’s Men in the London theatre. No adult company had ever leased an indoors theatre, and no adult company had ever before played within the walls of the city. The playhouse was in a wealthy and respectable neighbourhood, too, close to the playgoing members of the Inns of Court. Ben Jonson lived here as did Shakespeare’s friend, Richard Field; it was also a haven of painters’ studios and the workshops of feather-makers. It is also worth observing that no other company had ever boasted the proprietorship of two theatres, or extended itself to the purchase of an indoors “winter” theatre and an outdoors “summer” theatre. As it turned out, the financial gamble of the new “sharers” paid off, and their profit at the Blackfriars playhouse was almost twice that of their profit from the Globe.

The cost of a token at the Blackfriars playhouse was 6 pence for the gallery, contrasted with a penny or 2 pence for the Globe. A shilling purchased a bench in the pit, closer to the level of the stage, and a half-crown bought a box. Gallants and devotees could hire a stool and sit upon the stage for 2 shillings; this was a habit apparently detested by the actors themselves, for obvious reasons, but it seems to have made economic sense. There was no standing room. Yet the Blackfriars Theatre had attractions of its own. Its use of music, in a closed space, was more elaborate. It had indoor illumination, with candles or torches, and was much more appropriate for formal and masque-like effects. The candles were hung from candelabra which could be lowered for “mending” or trimming, but for afternoon performances the windows allowed natural light to enter the proceedings. There was no curtain and there were no “footlights”; the auditorium was as brightly illuminated as the stage.

It has often been suggested that Shakespeare’s dramaturgy changed after the removal to the Blackfriars Theatre, and that he increased the spectacular and the ritual elements of his drama. It is an interesting supposition but of course his use of Blackfriars postdates the highly ritualistic Pericles, which was performed at the Globe; it should also be remembered that in subsequent years his drama was to be seen at the Globe as well as at Blackfriars. There was no sudden or wholesale change in his art. Yet he was a skilful and professional man of the stage, and he made some alterations for the production of his plays in the private theatre. It is even possible that he added songs and music to old “favourites” such as Macbeth. The intimacy of the new theatre, which held some seven hundred spectators instead of the thousands at the Globe, may also have prompted him to make some changes in action and in dialogue. Many of these changes were not noted in the published versions of the plays, and are thus irrecoverable.

The King’s Men also now commissioned from other dramatists plays that were more suitable for the smaller space of Blackfriars. From this time forward, for example, most of Ben Jonson’s dramas were written for the company. Jonson’s success as a writer of court masques, and his previous career as the writer of plays for the children’s company, made him eminently suitable for the more refined audiences of the indoor playhouse. He wrote The Alchemist for this audience, succeeded by plays such as Catiline and The Magnetic Lady. At this juncture, also, the King’s Men employed the play-writing skills of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher; they had written all their plays for the private theatres, and were obvious candidates for the Blackfriars stage. Fletcher collaborated with Shakespeare in the older dramatist’s final works. It may in fact have been Shakespeare who discerned his talent and urged his colleagues to hire him. Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster bears a striking resemblance to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, but it is not clear which came first. The important point, however, is that they were both written for the conditions of the new theatre. Indeed in later years the King’s Men would become associated with, and identified by, the Blackfriars playhouse as their principal centre of operations.

There is one other change that is associated with the use of indoor playhouses. From 1609 onwards the plays of the King’s Men were divided into acts and intervals. Earlier dramas, when published after this date, have also been artificially divided into acts. It had become the new convention, dependent entirely upon the new conditions of the indoors playhouse where musical interludes became more significant; there was also the necessity of trimming the candles, for which the interval gave a convenient opportunity. Intervals had in any case already been introduced into the performances at court and at the Inns. They had become the token of a more “polite” attitude towards the experience of play-going. They were the fashion.

It is only to be expected that Shakespeare himself accepted the theatrical innovation in his last plays, and that he handled it expertly. He even revised the structure of some of his earlier plays, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear, in order to accommodate the use of acts; in the latter case, particularly, he used the opportunity of restaging to make large revisions to the play itself. But there is no clear or general transformation. All of his subsequent plays could have been performed either at the Globe or at Blackfriars.

Coriolanus may be a case in point. It is a play that seems naturally to form itself into acts, and the sound of cornets is demanded on two occasions. Cornets were generally supplied in private playhouses. But Coriolanus also calls for trumpets, a Globe speciality, and some of the play’s staging would suggest the larger arena of the public playhouse. So he composed it with both stages in mind. There were other Roman plays in the period, Sejanus and Catiline among them, but no one had previously treated the theme of Coriolanus, the Roman nobleman who refused to co-operate with the plebeians, and was exiled from the city only to return with an enemy army. Shakespeare had known the story from his schoolboy reading, and invoked the name of Coriolanus in the very early play of Titus Andronicus. He was one of the figures of Shakespeare’s imagination. Shakespeare found the general story in North’s translation of Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, one of his most constantly used and prolific source-books. By curious chance a paper survives, noting that a copy of North’s translation was borrowed from the library of Ferdinando Stanley; it was loaned to one “Wilhelmi” by Ferdinando’s wife, Alice, and returned in 1611.

Shakespeare proceeded to intensify the drama of Plutarch’s central characters. There is a spareness in the language that is reminiscent of Julius Caesar, another Roman play in which a mighty figure is raised and pulled down. There are passages, however, where he seems undecided between verse and prose; in the cauldron of creation, they were indistinguishable. He had also become more interested in the theatrical possibilities of a particular flaw or weakness in character, whether amorousness in Antony or pride in Coriolanus. Yet as with all of Shakespeare’s most important figures, Coriolanus is conceived in ambiguity. The rules or standards of interpretation are never clear, and there is no possibility of any final judgement. Like his maker, he remains opaque. He exists; he sings his high chant; and then he is ended.

Yet the play is affected by all the pressures of the time. The great insurrection in the Midlands of the previous year had been bloodily suppressed, but the summer of 1608 was marked by dearth and famine. On 2 June the king issued “A Proclamation for the preuenting and remedying of the dearth of Graine, and other Victuals” but it had only limited effectiveness. The people were starving from want of bread, and it is not at all surprising that the first scene of Coriolanus concerns the plight of the Roman citizens who are “all resolu’d rather to dy then to famish.” The first citizen declares that they must “revenge this with our Pikes, ere we become Rakes. For the Gods know, I speake this in hunger for Bread, not in thirst for Reuenge”(19–22). Yet it would be wrong to consider Shakespeare as fundamentally sympathetic to their cause. In Coriolanus the crowd is portrayed as fickle and ever changeable, as light and as variable as the wind. In what seems to be an unconscious token of his attitude Shakespeare writes the stage-direction, “Enter a rabble of Plebeians.” They are contrasted with the Roman nobles who in a fit of anachronism he calls “all the Gentry.” The tribunes of the people are not treated by Shakespeare with any great respect, either. His opinion was shared by King James, who castigated the parliamentarians who failed to pass his expenses as “Tribunes of the people, whose mouths could not be stopped.”³ As a servant of the king, too, Shakespeare could not be seen to condone insurrection or rebellion. All of his instincts would in any case have been against it. He could draw attention to the plight of the poorer people without bread, while at the same time firmly withholding assent from their campaign of violence. That is what happens in Coriolanus.

There are other significant aspects to the play’s topicality. The first citizen launches a direct assault upon hoarding, and upon those who “Suffer vs to famish, and their Store-houses cramm’d with Graine”(76–77). It so happens that Shakespeare himself had already been noted for the storage of 80 bushels of malt at New Place, as we have seen, and there is no reason to doubt that he continued to store or hoard quantities of corn or malt. So through the irate voice of the first citizen he adverts to himself. It is a most extraordinary act of theatrical impersonality, suggesting very forcefully that his imagination was not violated by sentiment of any kind. He could even see himself without fellow feeling. When it is also noticed that some of the charges against the Midlands rioters are here replicated as charges against the nobleman, Coriolanus, then we realise that the events of the day have been displaced and reordered in an immense act of creative endeavour. Everything is changed. It is not a question of impartiality, or of refusing to take sides. It is a natural and instinctive process of the imagination. It is not a matter of determining where Shakespeare’s sympathies lie, weighing up the relative merits of the people and the senatorial aristocracy. It is a question of recognising that Shakespeare had no sympathies at all. There is no need to “take sides” when the characters are doing it for you.

Which is as much as to say that his sympathies, such as they were, lay entirely with the unfolding of the drama. It might even be suggested that the food riots at the beginning of the play (not present in the source, which merely describes the popular clamour of the Romans against usury) may simply have been Shakespeare’s way of arresting the attention of his audience. It was a way of allowing them access to the world of ancient Rome. It was a way of gaining their imaginative assent by presenting something topical and familiar. Certainly the theme of dearth disappears from the gathering drama. Once it had achieved its purpose, it was forgotten. It is an important token of Shakespeare’s true response to the world, which may well have been one of utter calmness and even of disinterest.

It has sometimes been surmised that he treats Coriolanus himself with a respect not untinged with admiration. He seems to be aware of his follies but forgives them for the sake of the character he presents to the audience. And that is the important point. The dramatist is intent upon presenting a character of power. Individual power is theatrical. Power misused and abused is also dramatic. Coriolanus is a thing of power; when he ceases to be that, he ceases to exist. That is the only reason Shakespeare chose him out of Plutarch. In a very interesting essay on Coriolanus William Hazlitt asserts that “the imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty … which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion.” Thus poetry puts “the one above the infinite many, might before right.”⁴ So the position of Coriolanus, reviled by the mass and exiled from Rome only to vow a terrible vengeance, is infinitely dramatic and elicits from Shakespeare some of his finest poetry.

CHAPTER 83. And Sorrow Ebs, Being Blown with Wind of Words

One of the most powerful figures in Coriolanus is the mother of the eponymous hero, Volumnia, who has sometimes been considered to be a portrait of Shakespeare’s own mother. One Danish critic, Georg Brandes, described Volumnia as the “sublime mother-form.”¹ By curious coincidence Mary Arden died in the late summer of 1608, even as Coriolanus was being written, and on 9 September was buried in the parish church. She had outlived her husband and four of her children; whether the evident success of her oldest son compensated for the losses among her other children, is an open question. She had seen him rise to eminence in his dual profession as actor and writer, and purchase one of the grandest houses in the town. There is every reason to believe that she was proud of his achievements, and perhaps somewhat over-awed by them. We may recall here the admonitory words of Coriolanus to himself, that he must stand (2946—7)

As if a man were Author of himself,

And knew no other kin.

His mother had been occupying the old house in Henley Street together with Shakespeare’s sister, Joan Hart, who continued to live there after Shakespeare’s own death.

Shakespeare must have visited his mother there before her death. It has even been suggested that Coriolanus was written at Stratford because of the large supply of stage-directions in the published text. Thus there is written, “In this Mutinie, the Tribunes, the Aediles and the People are beat in” and “Martius followes them to gates, and is shut in.” The argument postulates that he did not intend to be present for any of the rehearsals of the first performances, and so had to be more than usually explicit in his directions for the actors. It is a possible circumstance.

Just before his mother’s death Shakespeare sued a Stratford neighbour, John Addenbrooke, for debt in the borough court; the sum of £6 was not forthcoming and so Shakespeare sued Addenbrooke’s “surety” for the money. The case continued for ten months, a clear sign of Shakespeare’s determination in such matters. In October he stood as godfather to the infant son of the alderman, Henry Walker, who was christened as William; he left the child a bequest in his will. It is important to note that Shakespeare could be accepted as a godfather only if he had outwardly conformed to the Church of England. There were clear rules on this matter, particularly since the godfather was charged with the spiritual education of the child. No nonconformist or recusant would have been permitted in that role. Before the ceremony, Shakespeare would also have received holy communion as a token of his orthodox faith. As the child of a recusant household, attached to the old faith but conforming to the observances of the new, he would have grown up with a profound sense of doubt. That is why ambiguity became one of the informing principles of his art. And why should it not be a mark of his behaviour in the world?

This raises the vexed question of his religion, endlessly debated through the centuries. It is true that he used the language and the structure of the old faith in his drama, but that does not imply that he espoused Catholicism. His parents are likely to have been of the old faith, but he did not necessarily take it with him into his adulthood. The old religion was part of the landscape of his imagination, not of his belief. As Thomas Carlyle stated, “this glorious Elizabethan Era with its Shakspeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.”²

There have been many studies of the association between Catholicism and the theatre itself, at the time “most of our present English actors (as I am credibly informed) being professed Papists.” ³ William Prynne’s asseveration does not help to untangle Shakespeare’s private allegiances, however, and at most suggests that as an actor and dramatist he might have evinced a certain sympathy with the old faith. It must be said that there are a large number of friars and nuns, handled with gentle circumspection, within his drama; his contemporaries, in contrast, tended to treat them as an object of scorn or obloquy. There are also incidental references to Catholic rituals, services and beliefs that suggest some previous acquaintance with them; there are allusions to purgatory, to holy water, to the sacrament of penance, to the Blessed Virgin, and so on. They are all perfectly explicable on the understanding that the young Shakespeare was brought up in a household that professed the old faith. But his interest in ritual and sacramental observance was also part of his interest in the theatre. It was an aspect of his concern for the panoply of power, whether sacred or spiritual. He summons the pagan deities, for example, as frequently as he invokes the Christian God.

His own adult beliefs are much more difficult to estimate. It is possible that he was, in the language of the period, a “church papist”; he outwardly conformed, as in the ceremony of christening, but secretly remained a Catholic. This was a perfectly conventional stance at the time. There is also the statement, by Richard Davies, the Archdeacon of Coventry, that he “dyed a papist.”⁴ The archdeacon was a zealous Anglican, and would not have passed on this report with any great pleasure. It is not known how he received the information, but it is not necessarily inauthentic. It can be taken to mean that Shakespeare was given the sacrament of extreme unction at the time of his death. But this may have been at the instigation, or even the insistence, of his recusant family. He may have been too weak and too sick to comprehend the matter. Yet it is also sometimes the case that lapsed or quondam Catholics will, in extremis, embrace the possibility of redemption.

So there is only evidence by default. He seems to have avoided attending Anglican worship. There is no record for him in the token books (to prove that he had received holy communion) or vestry minute books of Southwark; he may have moved in with the Mount joys since, as a member of a Huguenot household, he was not bound to attend the Anglican service. But, on the other hand, there is also no reference to him in any of the prolific records of Catholic recusants. He made no protest and incurred no fine. Once more he becomes invisible. That invisibility, or ambiguity, is reflected in his work itself. Despite the myriad allusions to the old faith, Shakespeare in no sense declares himself. In the tragedies, for example, the religious imperatives of piety and consolation are withheld; these are worlds with no god. He never adverts to any particular religious controversy, unlike the satirists of the contemporaneous theatre. It should be added that there is also very little sign of religious sensibility in Elizabethan drama as a whole; it is as if the dramaturge, having been banished from temple and church, shook the dust from his feet and built his own temple in the unhallowed ground without. The safest and most likely conclusion, however, must be that despite his manifold Catholic connections Shakespeare professed no particular faith. The church bells did not summon him to worship. They reminded him of decay and of time past. Just as he was a man without opinions, so he was a man without beliefs. He subdued his nature to whatever in the drama confronted him. He was, in that sense, above faith.

Nevertheless he was godfather in this year to another William, baptised in the font of Stratford Church. William Greene was the child of Thomas and Laetitia Greene, who were in fact residing at New Place during this period. Thomas Greene was a local lawyer who had been educated at the Middle Temple, an institution with which Shakespeare was very well acquainted, and he had moved to Stratford in 1601. At some point he moved with his wife into New Place as a tenant, sharing the household with Anne Shakespeare and her daughters. It may have been a way for Shakespeare of easing the burden of costs. The fact that they named their son William is, in any case, an indication of harmony with the master of the house.

The continuance of the plague meant that, in the summer and autumn of 1608, the King’s Men were obliged to tour the provinces with their new plays. They were at Coventry at the end of October, and also at Marlborough, but the rest of their progress is unknown. They were back in London, however, for the court performances of that year. They performed twelve plays at Whitehall, but the titles are not recorded.

It is more than likely that Shakespeare’s most recent plays, Pericles and Coriolanus, were among them. But there is one other candidate for inclusion in this period. Timon of Athens is a play of strange clamour and majesty. It is the story of a man whose lavish generosity is not reciprocated and who, as a result, falls into a state of savage misanthropy. It has been suggested that it comes close to a fable or morality play, with Timon as a type rather than a character. But that is to misinterpret Shakespeare’s subtlety. There is no conflict here between good and evil, only between variously mixed natures.

The play cannot be securely dated. It is one of those free-floating dramas, without much contemporary reference and no record of contemporary performance, which could be placed anywhere in the early seventeenth century. It may be unfinished or have been abandoned. There are passages of dialogue that need revision, and certain elements of the plot are left suspended. His texts were always in a fluid and incomplete state but, to paraphrase Animal Farm, some are more incomplete than others. It is also possible that it represents a “first draft” by the dramatist, and that he was content to leave it at that point. There is also a theory that the play survives at various stages of composition, with some scenes “roughed out” and others almost finished. If that is the case, then it is a Shakespearian document of the utmost interest; it shows, as it were, the painterly “washes” of Shakespeare’s imagination. On this occasion he created a structure and sketched out the balance of plot and sub-plot, adding incident and detail, but he paid relatively little attention to the role of the minor characters. None of these observations necessarily implies that the play was not performed. Even in its incomplete state it is a fluent and powerful piece of theatre. There is no record of any contemporary productions, but that in itself is not conclusive.

The immediate source of the play was once more North’s translation of Plutarch, and indirectly we may see Shakespeare’s process of association. The story of Timon is related in Plutarch’s life of Antony, which Shakespeare studied for Antony and Cleopatra. In Plutarch’s work Alcibiades is the figure complementary to Coriolanus, the subject of Shakespeare’s previous drama. Alcibiades plays a large part in Timon of Athens. So there is a set of connections leading Shakespeare forward. He moved from one classical figure to another, all part of the immediate arena of his imaginative concerns. He was also influenced by an academic comedy, entitled Timon, which might have been performed at the Inns of Court. This drama may have played some part in the composition of King Lear as well, and so acted as a powerful spur to Shakespeare’s imagination.

It is also surmised that Timon of Athens was in part the result of a collaboration with the young dramatist Thomas Middleton, who by his mid-twenties was already well known for his verse and for his satirical city comedies. Shakespeare’s collaboration with Middleton resembled that with a co-author, perhaps George Wilkins, over Pericles. Shakespeare was happy to contribute scenes, or whole acts, while leaving intact the somewhat jejune work of his collaborators. It is as if he did not care very much about the finished article, as long as it was performable. In this respect he was acting as a professional man of the theatre rather than as an “artist” in the modern sense. It may well be that each dramatist wrote his selection of scenes independently, and that they were brought together only in the process of rehearsal. For this reason his colleagues did not originally intend to place Timon of Athens in the Folio edition of his collected plays. It was only included when a sudden gap (the result of problems over the publication of Troilus and Cressida) had to be filled. The King’s Men did not consider the play to be really “by” Shakespeare. As a result of its placing in the Folio, however, it has remained forever in the canon. The legacy and reputation of even the most eminent writers can sometimes be secured by accident.

CHAPTER 84. And Beautie Making Beautifull Old Rime

The plague raged through London for the entire year of 1609. Dekker lamented the condition of the period when “Pleasure itself finds now no pleasure but in sighing and bewayling the Miseries of the Time.” He recorded that “play-houses stand (like Tavernes that have cast out their Maisters) the dores locked up, the Flagges (like their Bushes) taken down; or rather like houses lately infected, from whence the affrighted dwellers are fled, in hope to live better in the Country.” And he added that “Playing vacations are diseases now as common and as hurtful to them as the Foul Evil to a Northern Man or the Pox to a Frenchman.”¹ The King’s Men were once more on a provincial tour to escape the miasma of the capital. They visited, among other places, Ipswich, New Romney and Hythe. For much of this journey they sailed around the coast.

Shakespeare, probably relieved of his acting duties, was certainly now considering a permanent removal to Stratford. His tenant or house-guest, Thomas Greene, was urgently enquiring whether a new house would be ready for him by the spring of 1610. This suggests that a date for Shakespeare’s return had been agreed. But in this year, too, Shakespeare had business finished and unfinished in Stratford. In June 1609, for example, he settled his dispute over debt with John Addenbrooke. In the records of the Stratford court Shakespeare himself is described as “generosus, nuper in curia domini Jacobi, nunc Regis Anglie.” ² He was, in translation, a gentleman recently at the court of James, now King of England. His status as the king’s servant was very well known in Stratford. He was something of a resident dignitary. In this year, too, he and Thomas Greene sent a suit of complaint to the Lord Chancellor over some matters concerning the Stratford tithes which Shakespeare had been granted. Later in the year his brother, Gilbert, had to appear in court for some unspecified offence; to judge from those cited with him, he had some violent companions in the neighbourhood.

Shakespeare had not finished accumulating land in the vicinity. In the following year he bought for £100 a further 20 acres from the Combe family, adding to his previous purchase of 127 acres eight years before. In this period his brother-in-law, Bartholomew Hathaway, paid £200 for the farm and farmhouse at Shottery where Anne Hathaway had been brought up. It was their real family home. It is likely that Shakespeare helped his relative to find that large sum. One astute scholar of Shakespeare’s imagery has noted that in Cymbeline, the play he was composing in this period, there is a continual vein of allusion to “buying and selling, value and exchange, every kind of payment,”³ as if Shakespeare’s mind was running upon such matters even without his realising it.

He may also have needed the seclusion of New Place to arrange in shape and order the sonnets he had written on various occasions in the past. Now that his mother was dead, he may have felt able to publish their somewhat scandalous content. It is not certain whether he considered the sensibilities of his wife — unless he believed, as many scholars have since maintained, that the contents would be understood to be manifest fiction. Deprived of income from the closed theatres, he may also have considered this an opportune moment to sell the manuscripts to a publisher.

They were duly published in 1609 under the title “SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS Neuer Before Imprinted.” They were printed by George Eld and were to be sold for 5d a copy, by John Wright whose shop was at Christ Church gate on Newgate Street. The dedication was signed by Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, rather than by Shakespeare himself. It must be the most famous dedication in all literary history, consisting of the mysterious and much debated lines.

TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSVING SONNETS MR.

W H ALL HAPPINESSE AND THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY

OVR EVER LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING

ADVENTVRER IN SETTING FORTH. TT.

It is not at all clear what is meant by this. Who or what is the “begetter”? The inspirer of the sonnets, or the person who provided them to the publisher? And who is “Mr. W H”? Could it be Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? But then why are the initials reversed? Is it William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who may have been the recipient of the early sonnets? It is unlikely that a nobleman would be addressed as “Mr.” Could it be William Hathaway? Or might it be Sir William Harvey, who had previously been married to the Countess of Southampton? It might even be a misprint for “Mr. W SH.” It is also possible that Thorpe misunderstood Shakespeare’s original dedication to “W H,” and added “Mr.” as an afterthought. Like all good historical problems, the interpretations are endless and endlessly intriguing. Who is the “adventurer” and to what obscure or dangerous corner of the world is he “setting forth”? Could this also be another reference to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who in the spring of this year became a member of the consortium known as the King’s Virginia Company?

It is sometimes suggested that Thomas Thorpe was a “pirate” printer who came across Shakespeare’s poems clandestinely and published them without authorisation. But there is no record of Shakespeare’s protest, and there is no sign that they were withdrawn from sale or subsequently “corrected” for an authorised edition. It is much more likely that Shakespeare himself was responsible for their collection and publication. The order of the poems is expertly arranged, and who else would have such a complete collection of the sonnets in manuscript? They were an enduring project, continued over several years. No one else would have owned all of the material available to the poet himself. In 1612, three years after publication, Thomas Heywood reported that Shakespeare had indeed published his sonnets “in his owne name.”⁴ Then, two years later, William Drummond recorded that Shakespeare had “lately published”⁵ his work on the subject of love.

There is no reason to doubt this contemporary testimony. Thomas Thorpe himself was a respectable publisher who had issued works by Jonson and by Marston, and who also had close connections with the theatrical world. In recent years he had published authorised versions of Sejanus and Volpone, performed by the King’s Men, as well as Eastward Ho! It is most improbable that he would print a pirated edition of poems by the most famous dramatist of the age. It would have been a grave lapse of duty in the eyes of his colleagues in the Stationers’ Company, and open him to severe censure.

It has been stated with some authority that by 1609 the fashion for sonnet sequences had passed, and that at this late date the passionate expression of even the most famous dramatist might not find favour. It is true that the early seventeenth-century world was fuelled by sudden fads and fashions. It was a time of constant novelty and inventiveness in which there was little room for old styles and old themes. But the first years of the reign of James had inaugurated a new range of sonneteering, and in particular a kind of roguish or epigrammatic “anti-poetry” of which the sonnets to the Dark Lady are a good example. It was not necessarily a bad time to be published.

Edward Alleyn purchased a copy of the Sonnets in the summer of 1609 (if the reference is not a later forgery), but the little volume does not seem to have been overwhelmingly popular. There was to be no further edition until 1640, long after the death of the poet. In contrast, Michael Drayton’s sonnet sequence was reprinted on nine separate occasions. There was, however, some reaction to Shakespeare’s publication. The young George Herbert condemned the sequence for indecency, and one early reader appended in his first edition “What a heap of wretched Infidel Stuff.”⁶ The complaint has not been upheld by posterity, but at the time it may have been provoked by the unflattering references to the Dark Lady or to the homo-erotic tone of some of the earlier sonnets.

However long Shakespeare remained in Stratford, he had returned to London for the Christmas season at court. He was no longer acting but he was still responsible for rewriting and general supervision of the plays set before the king. In the chamber accounts of Whitehall it is noted that the King’s Men played no less than thirteen times. One of those plays was the newly written Cymbeline.

It is a play that might have been composed for the newly purchased Blackfriars Theatre which, after a respite in the plague, opened a few weeks later in February 1610. There were a number of stage devices, including the descent of Jupiter “in Thunder and Lightning, sitting vppon an Eagle: hee throwes a Thunder-bolt. The Ghostes fall on their knees.” There was no mechanism for these effects at the Globe, so we may assume the likely venue to have been the private playhouse. Such gaudy interventions emphasise how carefully and deliberately Shakespeare staged his dramas for the new conditions of performance. There is “Solemne Musicke” and a jaunty parade of spirits, all adding to the atmosphere of intimate spectacle that the Blackfriars playhouse encouraged. This is also the play in which Imogen wakes up beside a headless corpse, and believes it to be the body of her husband. No artifice is too obvious, no illusion too theatrical, in this most pantomimic of plays. Shakespeare has taken a potential tragedy and elevated it to the status of melodrama. In this last phase of his career he was pre-eminently a showman.

Samuel Johnson did not admire Cymbeline.

To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.

If we rename folly as fancy, and absurdity as deliberate farce, then we may come to a better understanding of the play than the eighteenth-century critic. Shakespeare delighted in its “impossibility” because he was writing a play which was in part masque and in part romance. It was entirely suited to its period, at a time when Jacobean spectacle had reached new heights of artificiality. It was a play without a subject, except that of its own intricacy.

Shakespeare went back to the legendary history of Britain and to the plays of his childhood, even to the plays in which he had been cast as a young actor, summoning up the spirit of old romance; in the sequence of spectacle and vision towards the end of the play, he even employed an antique style in homage rather than in burlesque. Plays of this kind had become very popular on the London stage, with dramas such as Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s recent Philaster and the revival of the favourite Mucedorus. But, in Cymbeline Shakespeare out-runs them all with the sheer arbitrariness and extravagance of his invention. There was also a vogue for plays concerning the British past, perhaps reflecting the new king’s concern for a united Britain. Throughout this play, in fact, can be detected the pressure of James’s sovereignty in small allusions and details. There is one other detail. Imogen, disguised as a boy, claims that her master is one “Richard du Champ.” This is of course Richard Field in a French guise. Field had been the publisher of The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, in whose atmosphere of musical solemnity Cymbeline itself is bathed. Shakespeare here is making a playful allusion to his old friend.

The presence of Imogen is a reminder that in Cymbeline for the last time Shakespeare uses the device of the girl dressed as charming boy, when in reality she is a boy actor all along, with an attendant atmosphere of sexual bawdry and innuendo; it is a transformation so much associated with his plays that with some justice we may call it Shakespearian. No other dramatist employed the devices of cross-dressing so frequently or so overtly as Shakespeare. It is clear why he was so enamoured of it. It is ingenious and strange, allowing much subtle play and allusiveness. It offers rich comic possibilities, but it also invokes the spirit of sexual liberty. It is perverse and pervasive, representing the licence of Shakespeare’s imagination.

There are other echoes and allusions to his previous plays in Cymbeline, suggesting that the full force of his creation is deployed somewhere within it. There are invocations of Othello and Titus Andronicus, most strongly, but also of Macbeth and King Lear. A speech in the play closely parallels one of the sonnets which he was revising for publication.

In these last plays (which he did not necessarily know were his last) he was opening the gates. What is important in Cymbeline is the note of sustained feeling, what Hazlitt describes as “the force of natural association, a particular train of thought suggesting different inflections of the same predominant feeling,”⁷ which is evidence of continuous excitement in the process of writing. He uses the broken language of passion and of intimate feeling with many asides and colloquialisms, ellipses and elisions; he even seems to transcribe the language of thought itself, as it is turning into expression. His language rises upwards in endless ascent, with the soaring of the cadence matched with aspiring feeling and unforced fluency. The Jacobean audiences were entranced by it. They sucked up extravagant words like sweets.

The music for Cymbeline was especially written by the court lutanist, Robert Johnson, who had been brought in by the King’s Men to arrange the musical settings for the Blackfriars plays. One of the songs from the play, “Hark, hark, the lark,” survives in a manuscript score which may be Johnson’s own.

Two brothers are about to sing a dirge, the justly celebrated “Feare no more the heate o’th’ Sun,” when one of them explains that “our voyces Haue got the mannish cracke”(2188). The other then adds, in parentheses, “I cannot sing: Ile weepe, and word it with thee”(2191). It is clear that the voices of the two child actors had unexpectedly broken and, without replacements for them, the apology was added at a late stage of rehearsal. Shakespeare was accustomed to last-minute revisions, and in this broken music we discern the circumstances of the time.

CHAPTER 85. So There’s My Riddle, One that’s Dead Is Quicke

In the spring of 1611 Simon Forman, the Elizabethan doctor and magus, made notes upon the productions he had seen recently. He was among the thousands at the Globe who had gone to performances of Macbeth, Cymbeline and a brand-new play entitled The Winter’s Tale. Of Macbeth Forman principally noted the supernatural events and the prodigies. It seems from his account that the most extraordinary and effective scene was that in which Banquo’s ghost appears at the banquet. The witches obviously had a sensational effect, too, but from Forman’s account it is clear that they were played as “3 women feiries or Nimphes,”¹ perhaps by the boy actors. Forman made a professional note to himself when he observed “Also howe Makbetes quen did Rise in the night in her slepe, & walke and talked and confessed all, & the doctor noted her wordes.”² Forman also watched Cymbeline, for which he gives a bald summary of events; the spectacle of “a cave” impressed itself upon his imagination, so it must have been a striking effect somewhere within the “discovery space” of the stage. Forman is circumspect about The Winter’s Tale, although it is clear that the character who most entertained him was Autolycus “the Rog that cam in all tattered like coll pixci.” The part was no doubt played to great effect by Robert Armin, and led to Forman appending a note to “beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellous.”³

Shakespeare had been writing The Winter’s Tale in the preceding year, and its overwhelmingly pastoral setting has suggested to some critics that he wrote it at New Place in Stratford. The same reasoning would suggest that he wrote The Tempest while temporarily residing on an island in the Mediterranean. The Winter’s Tale is a play that could have been performed at the Blackfriars playhouse as well as the Globe; since they remained open for ten months of this year, 1611, it is likely to have been presented at both the indoor and outdoor theatres. The elaborately staged drama is crowned by the ultimate scene in which the supposed statue of Hermione is miraculously restored to life in front of her astonished husband and daughter. It is an exhilarating theatrical moment. Shakespeare may have previously seen it in action at two royal events. During the king’s entry into London in 1604, and during his opening of the New Exchange in 1609, statues also stirred into life and spoke. It may in fact have been one of the boys from the King’s Men who performed the feat at the New Exchange. Once Shakespeare had seen it, however, he had to use it.

The play was closer to a musical comedy than any previously written by him; there are six songs, five of them sung by Armin as Autolycus, with Robert Johnson as the very likely composer of the music. One song demands a trio. There are also two elaborate dances, by satyrs and by shepherds, which would have been closer to masque than popular folk dance. Music would also have been heard as the enchanted statue begins to move. It is perhaps indicative of the play’s appeal that it was performed at court on an unprecedented six occasions. It was better than a masque. It was a full-scale entertainment, drama and ritual all in one. Yet, as Forman suggests, it also pleased the great crowds at the Globe. Many of the scenes relied upon spectacle as much as sense. One long scene, one of the longest in all of Shakespeare’s works, depicts a sheep-shearing festival which becomes an image of timeless popular ritual. And there is the famous stage-direction in the third Act (1309-10):

This is the Chace,

I am gone for euer.

(Exit pursued by a Beare)

The bear was a familiar feature of Bankside, of course, and dancing or performing bears were also very common in the streets of London. But it is doubtful that the King’s Men used or borrowed a real animal from their colleagues in the baiting arena. It would have been more comic to have an actor in a costume. But the sudden and apparently random use of the animal testifies to Shakespeare’s extraordinary grasp of stage business. The appearance of the bear marks the transition in this play from the direst tragedy to the most whimsical comedy, and just such a diversion prepares the audience for the change in pace and tone. The pursuit of the old man by the bear is, of course, terrible and comic all at once. It is a symbol of the play itself.

As in all romances, or musical comedies, the passions in The Winter’s Tale are strident and ill-concealed. The principal themes are of insane jealousy followed by guilt and remorse; the unhappy and separated protagonists are then reunited in a scene of ultimate forgiveness and reconciliation. It is a play that induces happiness, and awakens hope, in its spectators. It is perhaps not coincidental that it was performed on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, and then again after the catastrophic death of James’s elder son and heir. The Winter’s Tale was something of a public benefit, a device to remove mourning. In this play the human and the natural come together, in the great ongoing rhythm of life itself. The poetry of the dialogue follows the natural fluencies and hesitations of thought itself; it is instinct with the life of the mind.

The principal source of the play is Robert Greene’s prose romance Pandosto, from which Shakespeare takes much of the material for his first three acts. It will be remembered that Greene was the author who, just before his death, had attacked “Shake-scene” in Groats-worth of Witte. Among other charges he accused him of plagiarism. Now, eighteen years later, Shakespeare was extracting matter from the dead man’s most popular work, making the whole plot more fanciful and more unreal. He may have permitted himself a moment of satisfaction. And then he called it a winter’s tale, an idle story, an old fable, a fireside extravagance. Shakespeare was not a sentimental man.

In this year, too, there were third editions of no fewer than three of his plays—Titus Andronicus, Hamlet and Pericles. These were plays from all the stages of Shakespeare’s career, from the very early Titus to the very late Pericles. He was now being recognised and measured by his total achievement. He could delight the royal family, please the audiences of Oxford, and entertain the great crowds at the Globe. It seems clear, in retrospect at least, that he had reached the very pinnacle of his career. And now he was on everyone’s lips. One author, writing upon the standards of “true writing,” refers to Shakespeare as one from whom “wee gather the most warrantable English.”⁴ In a letter of 1613 Leonard Digges, the stepson of Shakespeare’s executor, wrote of a “Booke of Sonets which with Spaniards here is accounted of their lope de Vega as in Englande wee sholde our Will Shakespeare.”⁵ Note that here he is “our” Shakespeare, already treated as a representative of the national literature.

For the winter season in late 1611 he returned to court with two new plays. In the revels accounts there are references, on 5 November, to “A play Called ye winters nightes Tale.” Four days before, “Hallomas nyght was presented att Whithall before ye kinges Maiestie a play Called the Tempest.”⁶ No significance can be read into the date of All Hallows, 1 November, when the poor would sing for soul-cakes. Yet there remains an air of enchantment, not unmixed with melancholy, about Shakespeare’s last completed play. He would collaborate with other dramatists in future productions, lending his skills and experience to the work of others, but The Tempest has the distinction of being the final work he wrote alone.

As in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale there are large elements of masque and music in The Tempest. It seems very likely that he wrote the play for production in the indoors playhouse of Blackfriars. It is very specifically designed for intervals between the acts, particularly that between the fourth and fifth act, when music would be played. Ariel and Prospero leave the stage together at the end of the fourth act, and then enter together at the beginning of the fifth. This would not have been possible at the Globe, where action was continuous and uninterrupted.

Shakespeare’s imagination was always roused by the sea. It is no accident, therefore, that he was drawn to the recently published accounts of colonial voyages. Two years previously, some colonists on their way to Jamestown, in Virginia, were blown by a severe storm onto the Bermudas. Shakespeare had read their adventures. He had also read a book entitled A True and Sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia as well as Silvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels, both published in 1610. He was already acquainted with some of the principal members of the Virginia Company, such as the Earl of Pembroke, and he had ready access to first-hand accounts of mutiny and insubordination among some of the colonists. He read Montaigne’s essay, “Of the Canniballes,” in Florio’s translation. He remembered Marlowe’s Faustus, and his schoolboy reading of Ovid and of the storm in Virgil’s Aeneid. There was a riding-master in London called Prospero. So all these things came together, stirred by the report of a great storm.

The Tempest begins with a great shipwreck with its “tempestuous noise of Thunder and Lightning” and the entrance of the mariners “wet.” From this first scene onward, Shakespeare explores in a wholly practical sense all the possibilities of the indoors stage. It is a play of almost continuous spectacle. There are songs with “solemne and strange Musicke” in a drama that is accompanied by music composed once more by Robert Johnson. The late plays could easily be identified as works “by Shakespeare and Johnson.” The elaborate effects of magic and the supernatural are also accompanied by instruments, as, for example, in the scene where the spirits enter “in seuerall strange shapes, bringing in a Table and a Banket; and dance about it with gentle actions of salutations.” And there was of course now the almost obligatory inclusion of the masque, heralded once more by music and by the goddess Juno’s descent upon the stage. Then enter “certaine Reapers (properly habited:) they ioyne with the Nimphes, in a gracefull dance” until they are dismissed by Prospero with the utterance of some of the most famous lines in all of Shakespeare (1612-14):

… we are such stuffe

As dreames are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleepe.

Shakespeare has created the most artificial of all plays that becomes a meditation upon artifice itself. The Tempest also has the distinction of using a classical form, with the unities of time and place, for the purpose of conveying completely non-classical, which is to say magical, effects. It is as if he were, like Prospero, writing a lesson in theatrical enchantment. It is sometimes concluded that Prospero is an image of Shakespeare himself, renouncing his “potent art” at the close of a successful theatrical career. But that seems an unwarranted supposition. There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare deemed his theatrical career to be at an end. The model for Prospero might in any case have been Doctor John Dee, the magus of Mortlake (where Shakespeare once stayed) who declared that he had burned his books of magic.

It is also sometimes suggested that at this late date Shakespeare was becoming disengaged from, or disenchanted with, the theatre; but the careful crafting of The Tempest suggests that he was still closely involved in all aspects of the drama. There is no sense of an ending.

CHAPTER 86. When Men Were fond, I Smild, and Wondred How

Shakespeare returned to Stratford in the early months of 1612 to bury his brother, Gilbert, in the old church. Gilbert Shakespeare was two and half years younger; he had never married, living with his sister and her husband in the family home of Henley Street where he may have continued his father’s trade as glover. He was literate, and well enough acquainted with business to act on his brother’s behalf in the purchase of Stratford land. There was now one surviving brother, Richard Shakespeare, who also continued to live as a bachelor in Henley Street; but he, too, would die before Shakespeare himself. It would be a strange man who, under these circumstances, did not consider the limits of his own mortality. It was a shrinking family, emphasised by the fact that Shakespeare had no male descendants direct or indirect.

He was back in London three months later, when he was asked to testify in a case concerning the Mountjoy family of Silver Street with whom he had lodged. The case had been brought by one of Mountjoy’s apprentices, Stephen Belott, who had married Mary Mountjoy but had still not received from Mountjoy himself the dowry that he had been promised. So he called William Shakespeare to testify on his behalf. The case was heard at the Court of Requests, at Westminster, on 11 May. Shakespeare was described as “of Stratford-upon-Avon,” which suggests that he had no residence in London during this period. He had been called as a witness because, as it transpired, he had acted as an intermediary between Belott and the Mountjoys in the matter of the marriage and the dowry.

A maidservant, Joan Johnson, declared the Mountjoys had encouraged “the shewe of goodwill betweene the plaintiff [Belott] and defendants daughter Marye.” She also recalled Shakespeare’s role in the affair. “And as she Remembreth the defendant [Mountjoy] did send and perswade one mr Shakespeare that laye in the house to perswade the plaintiff to the same marriadge.” It would seem, then, that Shakespeare had some skill as a “persuader” in affairs of the heart. A friend of the family, Daniel Nicholas, then amplified the picture of Shakespeare with his testimony that

Shakespeare told this deponent [Nicholas] that the defendant told him that yf the plaintiff would Marrye the said Marye his daughter he would geve him the plaintiff A some of money with her for A porcion in Marriadge with her. And that yf he the plaintiff did not marry with her the said Marye and shee with the plaintiff shee should never coste him the defendant her ffather A groate, Whereuppon And in Regard Mr. Shakespeare hadd tould them that they should have A some of money for A porcion from the father they Weare made suer by mr Shakespeare by gevinge there Consent, and agreed to marrye.

It is not clear if these are the exact words that Shakespeare used to Nicholas on this occasion; given the interval of eight years, it is unlikely. But it is clear that he played an intimate part in all the arrangements for the marriage portion, and in fact took upon himself the task of match-making. To be “made sure” was to perform a troth plight, pledging marriage one to another.

The testimony of Shakespeare himself, as transcribed in the court, is non-committal. This must have been a peculiarly sensitive moment, assuming that Shakespeare still retained the trust of Mountjoy himself. He was in practice being asked to testify against him. So there is a measure of caution in his reported testimony. It is most interesting, however, as the only recorded transcript of Shakespeare’s voice. The dramatist stated that “he knoweth the parties plaintiff and deffendant and hath known them bothe as he now remembrethe for the space of tenne yeres or thereabouts.” Stephen Belott “did well and honestly behave himselfe” and was a “very good and industrious servant in the said service,” although Shakespeare had never heard him state that he “had gott any great profitt and comodytye by the service.” Perhaps this was in answer to a question about Belott’s recompense from Mountjoy. Mrs. Mountjoy had been the one to solicit Shakespeare’s help in the marriage when she did “entreat” him “to move and perswade” Stephen Belott. He testified that she and her husband did “sundrye tymes saye and reporte that the said complainant was a very honest fellow.”

It seems that at some point Belott had then asked Daniel Nicholas to get some specific answer from Shakespeare about “how muche and what” Mountjoy was promising him on marriage to Mary. Shakespeare then replied, according to Nicholas, “that he promised yf the plaintiff would marrye with Marye … he the defendant [Mountjoy] would by his promise as he Remembered geve the plaintiff with her in marriadge about the some of ffyftye poundes in money and Certayn houshould stuffe.” But in subsequent questioning Shakespeare was extremely vague. He recalled that a dowry of some kind had been promised but, in contrast to Nicholas, he could not remember the sum “nor when to be payed.” Nor could he remember any occasion when Mountjoy “promised the plaintiff twoe hundered poundes with his daughter Marye at the tyme of his decease.” Nor could Shakespeare describe “what implementes and necessaries of houshold stuff”¹ Mountjoy gave with his daughter. In fact Belott and his new wife had received only the sum of £10, and some old furniture. It seems that Mrs. Mountjoy had urged her husband to be more generous, but she had died in 1606. From Belott’s point of view, it was all very unsatisfactory. And Shakespeare had not been of any help. He could not remember any details of any conversations. It might even be concluded that he was being deliberately vague or forgetful, for the sake of his old friendship with Mountjoy.

A second hearing took place on 19 June, when Shakespeare’s memory would have been further put to the test, but Shakespeare did not appear on that occasion. Like many such cases it grumbled on without any definite conclusion. It was referred to arbitration, and Belott was awarded a little over £6, but no payment by Mountjoy is recorded. The details of this ancient case are no longer of any consequence, except in so far as they help to illuminate Shakespeare’s life in the ordinary world. He seems to have been willing to act as a “go-between” in delicate marital negotiations, no doubt because he had a reputation for finesse in such matters. He was clearly not a forbidding or unapproachable man; quite the contrary. But when called to account for his actions he becomes non-committal or impartial, maintaining a studied neutrality. He withdraws; he becomes almost invisible.

CHAPTER 87. Let Time Shape, and There an End

There is a curious mention of a play performed at Whitehall on 8 June 1612, in front of the Ambassador of the Duke of Savoy. It was entitled Cardenna. It was then performed again at court in the following year, under the title of Cardenno. It is curious because, at a later date, a play was registered for publication under the title of “The History of Cardenio by Mr. Fletcher & Shakespeare.” It is well known that in this period Shakespeare and Fletcher were indeed collaborating upon dramas for the King’s Men. The fruits of their joint endeavours were to include All Is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It may be that Shakespeare had entered semi-retirement and that Fletcher had in fact taken over from Shakespeare as the company’s principal dramatist. Cardenio would then have as much claim to authenticity as the two other plays which have now formally entered the Shakespearian canon. But Cardenio has not survived. It is a lost play. It may have been derived from the first part of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which the character of Cardenio emerges, and in 1758 Lewis Theobald, a distinguished editor of Shakespeare’s works, published a play on the story of Cardenio which he claimed to be “revised and adapted” from a manuscript in his possession “written originally by W. Shakespeare.” No trace of the manuscript has been found.

If Shakespeare did indeed play a part in writing Cardenio in 1612, it is the only drama of that year with which he can be associated. All subsequent plays would also be collaborative works. So there is clear evidence of a diminution of activity, the reasons for which are unclear. It may have been encroaching ill-health; it may have been the pleasures of Stratford and of retirement; it may simply have been the loss or lack of inspiration. He may have done as much as he had ever wanted to do. It is not an unusual scene in the last years or months of a writer’s life. He did not necessarily “know” that he would be dead within three years; when his imagination dimmed, death may have intervened naturally.

There was one unwanted and unwarranted publication, however, in this year. The printer William Jaggard brought out a third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim in which five of Shakespeare’s poems, purloined for the occasion, were added to much inferior stuff and the whole advertised as “by W. Shakespeare.” One of the authors whose work had been pirated for this collection, Thomas Heywood, then complained of the “manifest injury” done to him. He went on to claim that “the Author,” or Shakespeare himself, was “I know much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknowne to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.”¹ Shakespeare’s remonstrances must have had some effect, because a second title-page was added without any attribution to him. It is a trivial incident that displays the extent of Shakespeare’s literary fame.

In his preface to The White Devil, published this year, John Webster adverts to “the right happy and copious industry of M. Shake-speare, M. Decker & M. Heywood.”² It may seem odd at this late date to include Shakespeare with such manifestly inferior writers, but the disparity would not have occurred to anyone at the time. Contemporaries lack the subtle discrimination of posterity. In this case the emphasis is being placed upon the three dramatists’ fluency and speed of production. Ben Jonson had said as much in the same year, with his address to the reader in The Alchemist in which he disparaged those dramatists who “to gain the opinion of copy”³ or facility, will not check or polish their invention. Jonson’s disguised complaint was that Shakespeare had written too much. It is not likely to have been a criticism upheld by the audiences of the period.

From Christmas 1612 through to 20 May 1613, the King’s Men played continually at court as well as Blackfriars and the Globe. Among the royal performances were those of Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Othello and Cardenio. For the betrothal and marriage of King James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, the King’s Men played on no fewer than fourteen occasions. For these performances they received the large sum of £153 6s 8d.

Despite the evident fact that Shakespeare was writing less there is no indication that he was losing his interest in, or enthusiasm for, the theatre itself. In March 1613, for example, he completed negotiations to buy the gatehouse of Blackfriars. It was described as a “dwelling house or Tenement” partly built over “a great gate.” It was against the building known as the King’s Wardrobe on the west side, and on the east bordered a street that led down to Puddle Dock; the price also included a plot of ground and a wall. Part of it had once been a haberdasher’s shop. He was now very close to the Blackfriars playhouse and, by means of a wherry from Puddle Dock, in easy reach of the Globe on the other side of the river. Shakespeare paid £140 for the property, of which £80 was in cash and the other £60 tied up with a kind of mortgage.

The purchase may have been purely an investment on Shakespeare’s part, but then why break the habit of a lifetime and invest in London rather than in Stratford property? It may have been the propinquity to the playhouses that steered his decision. Did he still think of himself as a man of the theatre? He was now collaborating with Fletcher, and could hardly have done so from Stratford. He may simply have grown tired of living in lodgings, and wanted some permanent home in the capital. He was still only in his forties and, despite the deaths of two of his brothers, he may have had little reason to doubt his longevity.

There were, as so frequently in seventeenth-century legal transactions, complications. Shakespeare brought in with him three co-purchasers or trustees to safeguard his interest. One of them was Heminges, his colleague from the King’s Men, and another was the landlord of the Mermaid Tavern, William Johnson. This suggests some familiarity on Shakespeare’s part with the famous drinking-place. The third trustee was John Jackson — also an habitué of the Mermaid — whose brother-in-law, Elias James, owned a brewery by Puddle Dock Hill. They were three local men of some repute, therefore, and represent precisely the kind of society to which Shakespeare had become accustomed. It has been suggested that Shakespeare chose these trustees so that a third of the property would not automatically be inherited by his wife, as her “dower” right, and there may have been some agreement (no longer extant) on its use after his death. In 1618, two years after his death, the trustees did in fact convey the gatehouse to John Greene of Clement’s Inn and to Matthew Morrys of Stratford “in performance of the confidence and trust in them reposed by William Shakespeare deceased, late of Stretford aforesaid, gent., … and according to the true intent and meaning of the last will and testament of the said William Shakespeare.”⁴

Morrys and Greene were part of Shakespeare’s extended family. Morrys had been the confidential secretary of William Hall, who was the father of John Hall, Shakespeare’s son-in-law, and had been entrusted with William Hall’s books on alchemy, astrology and astronomy in order to instruct John Hall on these arcane matters. Greene was a friend and neighbour, the brother of Thomas Greene who had resided for a while in New Place. It looks very much as if these two men were acting as agents on behalf of John Hall and his wife Susannah Shakespeare. It was the only London property owned by the Shakespeare family, and the beneficiaries may have wished to make good use of it. So by means of complication and indirection Shakespeare made sure that the house reverted to his oldest daughter rather than to his wife. Any interpretation is possible, the most likely being that Anne Shakespeare had neither need nor use for a house in the capital. She never actually visited London, as far as is known, and is hardly likely to have done so after the death of her husband. Or the whole matter may have simply been a technical or legal device to expedite a quick mortgage without incurring a fine. It is all too easy to over-interpret ancient documents.

The gatehouse did have a very curious history, however, largely concerned with its role as a papist “safe-house” in times of trouble. As the former home of the black friars, before the dissolution of the monasteries, it carried some ancient spirit of place. In 1586 a neighbour complained that the house “hath sundry back-dores and bye-wayes, and many secret vaults and corners. It hath bene in tyme past suspected, and searched for papists.”⁵ A relative of the Lancashire Hoghtons, Katherine Carus, died here “in all her pride and popery.”⁶ Then in later years it was used as a hiding-place for recusant priests, and it was searched many times. In 1598 it was reported that it had “many places of secret conveyance in it” as well as “secret passages towards the water.”⁷ The owners admitted to being adherents of the old faith, but denied harbouring priests. The papist connection may simply be coincidental, and Shakespeare may have purchased the house for quite other reasons, but it is suggestive of a certain affection or nostalgia.

It seems that he also leased out a set of rooms in the gatehouse to John Robinson, son of a Catholic recusant who had harboured priests in Blackfriars and brother of a priest who was lodged at the English College in Rome.

Robinson’s affiliations are really not in doubt, and he may in fact have acted as a “recruiting agent” for the Jesuit college at St. Omer.⁸ In his will Shakespeare refers to the gatehouse “wherein one John Robinson dwelleth scituat.” Some biographers suggest that Robinson was a servant rather than a tenant of Shakespeare, but the connection was in any case a close one. Robinson visited Stratford, and was one of those who attended New Place in Shakespeare’s dying days. He was a witness who signed the dramatist’s will. Nothing else is known of him. The cloak of Shakespeare’s invisibility covers those closest to him.

There is much that is perplexing about Shakespeare’s association with known or suspected recusants. A list of his acquaintance will reveal six men who suffered death for the old faith; in 1611 John Speed explicitly linked the dramatist with the Jesuit missionary, Robert Persons, as a “petulant poet” and “malicious papist”⁹ intent on treasonable practice. There is a connection, glimpsed by his contemporaries, but it remains occluded.

One of Shakespeare’s new neighbours was Richard Burbage, who owned a great deal of property in Blackfriars. In fact, shortly after purchasing the gatehouse, Shakespeare collaborated with his colleague in a surprising venture. They designed an impresa for the Earl of Rutland, to be worn by that young nobleman on the occasion of the Accession Day tilt of 24 March. An impresa was a badge or token which acted as a kind of cipher for the wearer’s moral characteristics; it generally included an emblem, and a motto, painted upon pasteboard. Shakespeare’s motto for Rutland may have been suitably cryptic. A courtier of the time noted that some of the imprese were so obscure “that their meaning is not yet understood, unless perchance that were their meaning, not to be understood.”¹⁰ Shakespeare was paid 44 shillings in gold pieces for the design of the device, and Burbage the same amount for constructing and painting it. The object itself has not survived, but clearly the young earl considered that Shakespeare and Burbage were the two most prominent of the courtly makers. Burbage also had a considerable reputation as a part-time artist. The Earl of Rutland may also have seen the impresa created by Shakespeare for the tournament of Pericles, and had been suitably “impressed.”

It should not be a surprise that Shakespeare, at this late stage of his career, was called upon to perform relatively minor tasks. He had in his youth been called a “Johannes factotum,” after all, and he may have enjoyed the opportunity of creating on a small scale. It has for some time been suspected, for example, that he composed epitaphs for his friends and colleagues — sometimes in game and sometimes in earnest. There is extant an epitaph to Elias James, the brewer whose premises were on Puddle Dock Hill. It is to be found in a manuscript that includes a poem, “Shall I die?” which has also been tentatively attributed to Shakespeare. The seventeenth-century antiquary Sir William Dugdale, who has a reputation for accuracy, stated that the epitaphs on the tombs of Sir Thomas Stanley and Sir Edward Stanley in Tonge Church “were made by William Shakespeare, the late famous tragedian.”¹¹ They strengthen the dramatist’s connection with the Stanley family, and increase our understanding of the acquaintance of “gentle” Shakespeare. It seems likely that Shakespeare also composed the epitaph for his friend and neighbour in Stratford, John Combe, and in fact Combe’s tomb was constructed by the partnership of Garret and Johnson close to the Globe on Bankside. Shakespeare evinces a particular interest in, and fondness for, funereal monuments; no doubt the Combe family left the commissioning in his hands. It has also been suggested that Shakespeare’s own epitaph, containing the famous curse on anyone who moves his bones, was written by the incumbent himself.

CHAPTER 88. I Haue Not Deseru’d This

An incident on the afternoon of Tuesday 29 June 1613 threw all of Shakespeare’s plans into confusion. The King’s Men were playing All Is True at the Globe, a play concerning the marital affairs of King Henry VIII upon which Shakespeare collaborated with Fletcher. It was a new play, having been performed only two or three times previously. The courtier, Sir Henry Wotton, has left a complete account of the disaster that ensued. “Now,” he wrote:

King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.¹

Another observer of less sardonic temper noted that “the fire catch’d & fastened upon the thatch of the house, and there burned so furiously as it consumed the whole house, & all in lesse than two houres (the people having enough to doe to save themselves).”² A third account confirmed that all of the spectators escaped without injury “except one man who was scalded with the fire by adventuring in to save a child which otherwise had been burnt.”³

It was a disaster for the King’s Men, who had been deprived of a venue and an investment in one swift action. It might have been an enactment of Prospero’s words that “the great Globe it selfe” shall “dissolue” and “Leaue not a racke behinde.”

There was of course the immediate matter of rebuilding. Shakespeare owned a fourteenth part of the theatre’s shares, and was therefore liable for one fourteenth of the cost; this amounted to something like £50 or £60. He still owed £60 for the mortgage on the Blackfriars gatehouse, to be paid back within six months. Even for an affluent country landowner, these were large sums of ready money. Since there is no mention of the Globe shares in his will, it is possible that he sold them as a consequence of the fire. The Globe rose again within a year, but without Shakespeare as part owner. On this, or a later, date he also sold his shares in the Blackfriars playhouse. His financial interest in the theatre had come to an end. It is possible that he gave up play-writing when he gave up his shares, a practical end to a thoroughly pragmatic career.

There was a further, private, anxiety concerning his daughter Susannah. In the summer of this year she had brought an action of defamation against a neighbour, John Lane, who had claimed that she had “the running of the raynes & had bin naught with Rafe Smith”—that she had had sexual intercourse with Rafe Smith, in other words, and had contracted gonorrhoea. In the small enclosed community of Stratford, these were controversial allegations indeed against the wife of a prominent doctor and daughter of a local eminence. The case was heard in the bishop’s Consistory Court at Worcester Cathedral, a measure of the seriousness with which the affair was taken, but John Lane did not appear for questioning. The case brought by Susannah Shakespeare was proved, and John Lane was excommunicated.

In the latter part of 1613, in the absence of the Globe and the now almost predictable closure of Blackfriars from July to December, the King’s Men toured in the late summer and autumn in Folkestone, Oxford, Shrewsbury and Stratford itself. They played fourteen times at court, and among the court performances were the two plays jointly written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. All Is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen were the last fruit of Shakespeare’s association with the King’s Men, and as such have the curious status of all last things. It is likely that Shakespeare was himself at court to receive the congratulations and thanks of his sovereign. All Is True was performed at the Globe, unhappily as it turned out, but it was equally well suited to the private circumstances of court performance and preeminently to the indoors playhouse at Blackfriars. In one of those rare moments of dramatic enchantment, some of the events depicted in the play actually occurred in the same great chamber of the Blackfriars where the performance was being held. The re-enactment was so astonishingly complete that there must have been a somewhat eerie feeling of historical déjà vu about the whole performance. The scene in question concerns the appearance of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon in a consistory court, before the papal legate, to determine whether their marriage was legal or not. It was not a divorce court, as some have alleged; if there had been no marriage, there could be no divorce. It was a solemn and sacred occasion none the less, and in All Is True it is imparted with a weight of dramatic spectacle and rhetoric.

This is in keeping with a play which is freighted with historical allusions, to a period only just out of reach, and which is bounded by the notion of historical majesty. Sir Henry Wotton, in his report on the fire, had noted that the play “was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty.” Wotton disliked this aspect of the drama, since then the theatre seemed to become a second court. In the play there are spectacles and masques, processions and trumpeters, with elaborate stage-directions in one scene for the appearance of “short siluer wands … the great Seale … a Siluer Crosse … a Siluer Mace … two great Siluer Pillers.” There were scenes in which at least twenty-three players had to be accommodated upon the stage. The whole thing must have been performed very rapidly indeed to be encompassed within the “two short hours” promised by the Prologue.

How much of this is Shakespeare’s devising, and how much Fletcher’s, is open to guess. Before we ascribe the excessive theatricality to the younger man, however, it should be remembered that in his earliest plays Shakespeare had a pronounced and definite taste for spectacle. This is a period when English history plays were once more becoming fashionable, and Shakespeare always had an eye for fashion. All Is True also gave him the opportunity of exploring the nature and character of Wolsey, and it should come as no surprise that Shakespeare should illuminate him from within and thus avoid overt partisanship or prejudice; he wonders at his magnificence, but pities him in his fall. At a time when King James was seeking peace with Spain it was natural that the Spanish queen in the play, the aggrieved Katherine, is conceived in the form of suffering virtue.

It is generally agreed that Shakespeare wrote the first two scenes of the first act, involving court intrigue as well as the appearance of the king and the cardinal. He then went on to write the first two scenes of the next two acts, sketching out the main lines for his collaborator or collaborators to follow. He also wrote the great set scene of the Consistory Court, as well as the more intimate and lubricious dialogue between Anne Boleyn and an “old lady”; these are, in a sense, his specialities. The court scene is in fact largely transcribed from his main source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, and perhaps lacks the quick alchemy of his earlier borrowings; but the verse is forceful and supple enough to suggest no lessening of dramatic power. He wrote the scene in which Wolsey contemplates his fall, another great transition that Shakespeare had mastered in the early history plays; whenever any man fails, Shakespeare’s sympathy envelops him. He also wrote the first scene of the last act which sets up the denouement. He gave a structure, and a tone, to the whole production. He may also have gone over the finished playscript, adding phrases or images here and there. There may even have been a third collaborator, the elusive Beaumount, but at this point speculation becomes useless.

There seems to be no doubt, however, that The Two Noble Kinsmen was the next collaboration between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. On the title page of the first edition, published in quarto form in 1634, it is described as being “presented at the Blackfriers by the Kings Maiestie servants, with great applause: Written by the memorable Worthies of their time: Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakspeare. Gent.” It is worth noting that Fletcher’s name is mentioned first.

Shakespeare once more established the essential structure of the play, by writing the whole of the first act and parts of the final three acts; he may also have gone over the completed work, rephrasing and augmenting as he saw fit. It is a reworking of “The Knight’s Tale” from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales; characteristically Shakespeare takes a more ritualistic, and Fletcher a more naturalistic, attitude towards the original source. The fact that it was not included in the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays may suggest that it was considered to be a company, rather than an individual, play. All Is True had escaped that fate by being the culmination of a long sequence of history plays already accredited to Shakespeare.

Two of Shakespeare’s most alert and astute interpreters, however, found the signs that he had inhabited Two Noble Kinsmen all but overwhelming. Charles Lamb noted of its Shakespearian passages that he “mingles everything, he runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors: before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched and clamorous for discourse.”⁴ Schlegel, writing on the same play, considered its “brevity and fullness of thought bordering on obscurity.”⁵ There are occasions when meaning seems to run away from him, losing itself among a plethora of rich phrases, and there are occasions when the language is pushed to extremity (I.i.129-31):

But touch the ground for us no longer time

Then a Doves motion, when the head’s pluckt off:

Tell him if he i’th blood cizd field, lay swolne

Showing the Sun his Teeth; grinning at the Moone

What you would doe.

There are lines that seem purely Shakespearian, as when one queen speaks of her humble suit as (I.i. 184-5):

Wrinching our holy begging in our eyes

To make petition cleere.

There are times when the syntax is very complicated indeed, seeming to express the concept of difficulty itself. And there are occasions when Shakespeare seems to rebuke his own contorted prolixity. He had forged so supple and subtle a medium that, effectively, he could do as he liked with it. So it is perhaps worth quoting the last lines of the play, delivered as customary by the most well-born of the remaining characters on the stage. They are the words of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and they have some claim to being the last that Shakespeare ever wrote for the stage (2780-6):

O you heavenly Charmers,

What things you make of us? For what we lacke

We laugh, for what we have, are sorry, still

Are children in some kind. Let us be thankefull

For that which is, and with you leave dispute

That are above our question: Let’s goe off,

And beare us like the time.

In retrospect this may seem a fitting epitaph for Shakespeare’s career, with its resolution and its stoicism, its subdued gaiety and its sense of transcendence.

CHAPTER 89. My Selfe Am Strook in Yeares I Must Confesse

In the spring of 1614 a preacher was staying overnight at New Place. He was supposed to preach at the Guild Chapel, next door to Shakespeare’s dwelling, and the corporation paid the Shakespeare family 20 pence for the expense of “one quart of sack and one quart of clarett wine”¹ purchased to entertain the unnamed minister. It is not known if the master of the house was present on this occasion, but the likelihood must be that he spent more time in Stratford than in the gatehouse of Blackfriars. His seems to have been a kind of retirement, or semi-retirement, if only because of the evident fact that he neither wrote nor collaborated in more drama. But he still travelled to and from London.

His earliest biographer, Nicholas Rowe, states that the

latter part of his life was spent, as all Men of good Sense will wish theirs may be, in Ease, Retirement, and the Conversation of his Friends. He had the good Fortune to gather an Estate equal to his Occasion and, in that, to his Wish; and is said to have spent some Years before his Death at his native Stratford.²

There is no reason to doubt the essential narrative here, although it does tend to discount the purchase of his gatehouse in Blackfriars. The reasons given for his retreat have been various. He came back because he was tired and in ill-health. He came back because he knew that he was dying. He came back in order to revise his plays for future publication. All, or none, may apply.

Nicholas Rowe reports further that “his pleasurable Wit and good Nature engag’d him in the Acquaintance, and entitled him to the Friendship, of the Gentlemen of the neighbourhood.”³ These “gentlemen” would of course include the town worthies, many of whom he had known all his life and some of whom he would remember in his will. There were the Combes, for example, who lived in the largest house in Stratford and who were among the wealthiest families in Warwickshire. There was the Nash family, large landowners, who lived next door to New Place. And there was Julius Shaw, a very prosperous dealer in wool and high bailiff of the town; he lived two doors down from New Place. There were of course many other neighbours — as well as his immediate family — living in close proximity. These were the people whom he saw every day, and with whom he exchanged greetings and small talk. Shakespeare was now much more identified with his family, and with his native background, than he had been at any time since his childhood. He had, in a sense, completed the circle. The themes of restoration and regeneration, so familiar in his late drama, could now be applied to life itself.

There were also the local dignitaries with whom he would have had an acquaintance if not necessarily a friendship. Among these were Sir Henry and Lady Rainsford, who lived at Clifford Chambers very close to Stratford. John Hall, Shakespeare’s son-in-law, was their doctor; but they were also closely associated with another Warwickshire poet of note, Michael Drayton. John Hall had also once treated him with a concoction described as “syrup of violets.” Drayton, like Shakespeare, had risen from obscure Warwickshire origins to distinction in English letters and, perhaps more importantly, to gentlemanly status. They had followed different paths, with Drayton achieving the most obvious literary and poetical eminence after first fashioning a career as a dramatist; he became the English “laureate” and was granted a monument in Westminster Abbey, whereas Shakespeare had to be content with one in the local church. Shakespeare alluded to Drayton’s work in his drama, and Drayton himself praised Shakespeare in a set of public verses. Drayton was also a close friend of Shakespeare’s “cousin,” Thomas Greene, who had lived for a while in New Place. The vicar of Stratford blamed Shakespeare’s death upon a “merry meeting” in Stratford between Drayton, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. We may safely conclude that they were well acquainted, and that they saw each other in their local neighbourhood.

There was Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, the son and heir of Fulke Greville of Beauchamps Court who had played so large a part in Stratford affairs. As a poet and dramatist Greville knew Shakespeare very well indeed, and has left a cryptic report that he was in some sense Shakespeare’s “master.”

There was a larger Warwickshire “circle,” including men of the Middle Temple such as Greville and Greene, who felt themselves to be closely associated. The ties of territory and inheritance were very strong in early seventeenth-century England, and it was natural and inevitable that Shakespeare should return to Stratford at the close of his London career.

In the early summer of 1614, however, a “suddaine and terrible Fire” engulfed part of the town. The strength of the conflagration “was so great (the wind sitting full uppon the Towne) that it dispersed into so many places therof whereby the whole Towne was in very great daunger to have been utterly consumed.”⁴ Some fifty-four houses were destroyed, together with barns and outhouses and stables to the total value of £8,000. It was a calamity for the town, which had in Shakespeare’s lifetime been visited twice before by a devastating fire, and a charitable subscription was set up for the victims. Shakespeare’s own house, and his various properties, were not affected.

He was implicated, however, in a controversy of this year concerning the progress of enclosures upon the common land in the vicinity. He seems for the most part to have stayed away from local issues. Three years previously, the more affluent householders of Stratford raised money in order to assist the passage of a bill through Parliament “for the better Repayre of the highe waies”;⁵ there were seventy-one names on the list of those who had contributed, but that of Shakespeare was added later in the right-hand margin by Thomas Greene. It seems very likely that Shakespeare paid his own share at the last minute.

In the autumn of 1614, however, there was some trouble in the neighbouring hamlet of Welcombe where Shakespeare owned land. William Combe, a younger member of the family that Shakespeare knew so well, had inherited his uncle’s estate in that neighbourhood. So he aligned himself with Arthur Mainwaring, the steward to the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, in a scheme to enclose lands in Old Stratford and Welcombe. This would improve farming efficiency, but the land would be given over to pasture for sheep rather than to crops. The price of grain would consequently rise, and the rights of common grazing would be restricted. It was an old argument in which the more enterprising landowners were generally pitted against those who upheld the rights of the community. On this occasion William Combe and Mainwaring were challenged by the town council of Stratford, their most vociferous opponent being Thomas Greene. So Shakespeare’s cousin was pitted against Shakespeare’s friends.

Shakespeare had in the interim entered a separate agreement with Mainwaring which promised him compensation “for all such losse detriment & hinderance”⁶ to his tithes as the result of the planned enclosures. Shakespeare was not ready to align himself with either party in the dispute, but was merely protecting his own financial interests. Thomas Greene had travelled to London to plead the town’s case at Westminster, and in the middle of November paid a visit to his cousin “to see him howe he did.”⁷ So Shakespeare had returned to London, and it is likely that he was staying in Blackfriars in order to superintend the court productions of his plays in that year. Greene asked him about the plans for the enclosures and

he [Shakespeare] told me that they assurd him they merit to inclose noe further then to gospel bushe & so upp straight (leavyng out part of the dyngles to the ffield) to the gate in Clopton hedge & take in Salisburyes peece: and that they meane in Aprill to servey the Land & then to gyve satisfaccion & not before.

So Shakespeare was very well acquainted with the plans of Combe and Mainwaring, to the extent that he knew in detail what they proposed to enclose. He was clearly also completely familiar with the topography of the area, as might be expected from one who had known it since his earliest childhood. Yet on this occasion, too, he refused to take sides in the dispute which implicated those closest to him. He assured Greene that he did not believe anything would be done, and in this belief he was joined by John Hall. His son-in-law had come with him to Blackfriars, and was present at the interview. Whether Hall had come in the role of relative, or doctor, is not known.

But, contrary to their reassurances, something was done. By the end of the year Combe and Mainwaring were planting hedges and digging ditches as a preliminary to enclosure, and Thomas Greene attended a meeting with a variety of local dignitaries. He noted that he had sent “to my Cosen Shakspear the Coppyes of all our oaths made then, alsoe a not of the Inconvenyences wold grow by the Inclosure.” It is clear enough that Shakespeare’s support and advice were considered to be important aspects of their campaign. When the digging and planting went ahead the Stratford corporation caused the ditches to be filled in, at which point scuffles ensued between the interested parties. Combe called the members of the Stratford council: “Puritan knaves!” But then women and children from Stratford were also conscripted to fill in the ditches.

So matters rested until the spring, when the Warwick Assizes prohibited Combe and Mainwaring from proceeding with their plans without showing good cause. Combe persisted, and went so far as to depopulate the village of Welcombe itself. Shakespeare again enters the record with a note by Thomas Greene to the effect of “W Shakespeares telling J Greene that I was not able to beare the encloseinge of Welcombe.” “J” was Greene’s brother. The meaning of “beare” here seems to be “bar,” and the import of Shakespeare’s remark then becomes clear. The process of enclosure was bound to go ahead. In this respect, he was wrong. The Chief Justice of the King’s Bench eventually forbade Combe to continue his plans.

Certain historians have criticised Shakespeare’s responses to the crisis of enclosures, and blamed him for not taking the side of the “commons” in the dispute over land. But he may simply have believed that the process of enclosure would be ultimately beneficial. More likely than not, however, he “believed” nothing whatever. He seems to have been incapable of taking sides in any controversy, and remained studiedly impartial in even those matters closest to him. It is hard to imagine him angry, or contemptuous, or bitter. His principal concern seems to have been with the preservation of his own finances. In any case his sentiments on the matter of enclosure suggest a resigned or fatalistic attitude towards the affairs of the world in harmony with the last lines of his last play —

… Let’s goe off,

And beare us like the time.

CHAPTER 90. The Wheele Is Come full Circle I Am Heere

Shakespeare stayed in London from November until after Christmas. This lengthy residence in Blackfriars suggests that he was busy over theatrical matters and, despite the society of John Hall, not in particularly bad health. His presence may well have been requested by the King’s Men, since his withdrawal from play-writing had considerably affected their receipts and even their reputation. They performed on eight occasions at Court during this winter season, but the Lord Chamberlain had complained that “our poets brains and inventions are grown very dry, in so much that of five new plays there is not one that pleases; and therefore they are driven to publish over their old, which stand them in best stead and bring them most profit.”¹ He is describing here, at least in part, the “old” repertory of Shakespeare’s plays that stood considerably higher in esteem than the “new” plays. Shakespeare was in as much demand as ever.

As we have seen, there is a theatrical tradition concerning the role of Henry VIII in All Is True which suggests direct supervision by Shakespeare. It was suggested in the late seventeenth century that the “part of the King was so right and justly done by Mr. Betterton, he being instructed in it by Sir William [Davenant], who had it from old Mr. Lowin, that had his instructions from Master Shakespeare himself.”² So the line of direction descends as far as John Lowin, who was indeed a member of the King’s Men in the last years of Shakespeare’s life. It seems that Shakespeare coached the then young actor in his penultimate play.

Shakespeare may also have returned to London in the spring of 1615 when he and six others entered a bill of complaint against Matthew Bacon of Gray’s Inn, for withholding the deeds of certain properties in Blackfriars. Yet this is the last possible recorded occasion of his stay in the city. When he returned to Stratford, he would never leave it again.

Since in the first weeks of 1616 he gave instructions for the drawing up of his will, it is likely that he began to suffer from some serious malady; he had given instructions on 18 January, and had arranged to execute it a few days later, but for some reason the appointment was postponed.³ It has been estimated that the usual period between the making of the will and death was approximately two weeks, so Shakespeare may have experienced some form of remission or relief.

The nature of his ill-health, or his disease, has been endlessly debated. There are some who believe that he was suffering from tertiary syphilis, a not uncommon condition in the period and one to which he could undoubtedly have been exposed. Analysis of his final signatures has suggested that he had contracted a malady known as “spastic cramp,” a variant of “scrivener’s palsy” that affected voluminous writers. This would make it impossible for him to write at any length, and would also provide some explanation for his withdrawal from play-writing. Others have suggested that he died of alcoholism. Reference has already been made to the “merry meeting” between Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, and Ben Jonson. It is reported, by the Stratford vicar, that they “drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted.”⁴ This of course need not have been a sign of alcoholism.

Yet the disease may not have been of a degenerative kind at all. It may have seized him suddenly and violently, withdrawing once only to invade him with greater virulence. A seventeenth-century doctor noted that fevers were “especially prevalent in Stratford” and that 1616 was a particularly un-healthful year.⁵ In the winter of 1615 and 1616 there was an epidemic of influenza; the winter itself had been “warm and tempestuous,” a sure nurse of ague. There was also a small rivulet running past New Place, and it was later proven that these small streams were carriers of typhus. The supposition might then be that he was carried off by typhoid fever. The funeral was held so soon after the death that his fatal illness may have been considered to be contagious.

One reason for the postponement of the execution of the will, however, may have been the imminent marriage of his remaining daughter. Judith Shakespeare was betrothed to one of Shakespeare’s family friends, Thomas Quiney, but in the following month they were excommunicated for having married in Lent without the possession of a special licence. They may have married in haste. It seems that the local vicar had been at fault, but the punishment was reserved for the participants. This was succeeded by worse news, when Quiney was brought before the bawdry court for unlawful copulation with a local girl. The girl herself, Margaret Wheeler, had died in childbirth together with her infant. Mother and child had been buried on 15 March, just a month after the marriage between Quiney and Judith Shakespeare. It must have been common knowledge and local gossip, at the time of the marriage, that a girl made pregnant by Quiney was still living in town and proclaiming the paternity of her child. It was a local disgrace, something of a humiliation touching the family of the Shakespeares, and as a result Shakespeare changed his will by striking out the name of Thomas Quiney.

The will itself was drawn up on 25 March 1616. It has sometimes been suggested that the will has been executed in Shakespeare’s own hand; but this is very unlikely. It was no doubt composed or transcribed by his lawyer, Francis Collins, or by the lawyer’s clerk. A preliminary will had been made in January, but this was now altered. A new first page was substituted, and there were many changes made on the second and third pages. It opens in the conventional manner with the pious declaration that “In the name of god Amen I William Shackspeare … in perfect health & memorie god be praysed doe make & Ordayne this my last will and testamente.” It is not clear that Shakespeare was in perfect health or memory; the evidence of his final signatures suggests a weak and debilitated man.

He deals first with the case of his daughter Judith, who had recently entered such an unsatisfactory marriage with Thomas Quiney. The reference to “my sonne in L[aw]” has been crossed out, and the phrase “daughter Judyth” substituted. He left her £150 on condition that she renounced any claim to the cottage he owned in Chapel Lane close to New Place. This suggests that she and her new husband had been living there. He also bequeathed her a further £150, three years later, if she or any of her heirs were still living. Thomas Quiney could only claim this sum if he gave Judith lands valued at the same amount. It was not a large bequest, at least compared to the largesse bestowed upon her sister, and in equity she could have expected three or four times that amount. It is apparent, therefore, that Shakespeare was in some respects stern or unyielding with his younger daughter.

Shakespeare then left £30, and his clothes, to his sister. Joan Hart was also allowed to stay in Henley Street for a nominal rent, and £5 were left to each of her three sons. Unfortunately Shakespeare forgot the name of one of his nephews. He scarcely refers to his wife, but Anne Shakespeare would have been automatically entitled to one-third of his estate; there was no reason to mention her in an official document. But he does make one provision. As an afterthought in the second draft he added “Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture.” This has aroused much speculation, principally concerned with the burning question why he did not leave her the “best” bed. In fact the “best” bed in the household was that characteristically used by guests. The “second best bed” was that reserved for the marital couple and, as such, is best seen as a testimony to their union. As one cultural historian has put it the marital bed represented “marriage, fidelity, identity itself” and was “a uniquely important possession within the household.”⁶ The bed may indeed have been an heirloom from the Hathaway farmhouse in Shottery. It may have been the one on which Shakespeare was lying. The fact that he added this bequest as an afterthought suggests the benevolence of his intention. He is unlikely to have wished to snub his wife at the last minute. It is of some interest, however, that he did not feel the slightest need to call his wife by the conventional testamentary phrases of “loving” or “well beloved”; he did not need, or like, conventional sentiments. Nor did he name his wife as his executrix, and instead left everything in the hands of his apparently more capable daughter. Anne Shakespeare may therefore have been incapacitated in some way.

The larger part of his bequest did indeed go to his older daughter, Susannah, and to her husband. They are nominated by Shakespeare as the ones to hold together his estate. He left the Halls “All the rest of my goods Chattels Leases plate Jewels & household stuffe whatsoever.” The “leases” may have included his shares in the Globe and in Blackfriars, if he still in fact retained them. He left his daughter New Place and the two houses in Henley Street as well as the gatehouse in Blackfriars; in addition Shakespeare bequeathed her all the lands that he had gradually purchased over the last few years. The bequest was to be held entire and in turn left to the first male son of the Halls, or to the son of the second son, going down through the generations of males in the putative Shakespearian genealogy. His patriarchal instincts were clear, even though nature thwarted his intentions.

There were other gifts to relatives and to neighbours, as well as the price of three gold rings for three of his colleagues from the King’s Men — Richard Burbage, John Heminges and Henry Condell. Since Heminges and Condell were the begetters of the subsequent Folio edition of his plays, the rings can be considered to be a “forget not” token. It makes it more, rather than less, likely that in Stratford he had been revising his plays for future publication.

He left £10 for the relief of the poor of Stratford, by no means an extravagant sum, and his processional sword to Thomas Combe. It has been considered odd or singular that Shakespeare mentions no books or play-manuscripts in this will, but they may have been included in the “goods” generally inherited by the Halls. They could also have formed part of an inventory that is now lost. In his own will, at a later date, John Hall refers to his “study of Bookes” which were entirely scattered to the winds. There was also a report that Shakespeare’s granddaughter (he had no male heirs) “carried away with her from Stratford many of her grand-father’s papers,”⁷ but this cannot now be verified.

It is a sensible and business-like document, evincing Shakespeare’s eminently practical temperament. It is true that other early seventeenth-century testators are more effusive in their allusions to family and friends, but they had not spent a lifetime writing plays. When one eighteenth-century antiquary complained that the will was “absolutely void of the least particle of that Spirit which Animated our Great Poet,”⁸ he forgot that he was dealing with a legal document rather than a work of art. The distinction would not have been lost on Shakespeare himself. He signed the first two sheets of the will “Shakspere,” and the final sheet was completed with the words “By me William Shakspeare.” The surname trails off, as if the hand could hardly hold or direct the pen. These were the last words he ever wrote.

Shakespeare lingered for four weeks from March into April; if he was indeed suffering from typhoid fever, the period is right. He would have experienced insomnia, fatigue and overwhelming thirst which no amount of liquid could reasonably assuage. It is reported from no very reliable source that “he caught his death through leaving his bed when ill, because some of his old friends had called on him.”⁹ We have had cause to note the belief that “he dyed a Papist,” which may mean that he was given extreme unction according to the old Catholic rite. As death approached, the passing bell was rung in the Stratford church. He died on 23 April and, having been born on the same day, he had just entered his fifty-third year.

He was embalmed and laid upon the bed, wrapped in flowers and herbs in the process known as “winding” the corpse. His friends and neighbours walked solemnly through New Place to view the body; the principal rooms and staircases were draped with black cloths. The corpse was then “watched” until interment. He was wrapped in a linen winding sheet and, two days later, carried down the well-worn “burying path” to the old church. It was sometimes the custom to accompany the burial procession with music. He was said to have been buried at a depth of some 17 feet; this seems a deep pit indeed but it may have been dug out of fear of contagion from the typhus. He was placed beneath the floor of the chancel, beside the north wall, as his status as lay rector and receiver of tithes required. It is likely to have been Shakespeare himself who wrote the epitaph:

GOOD FREND FOR IESVS SAKE FORBEARE,

TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE!

BLEST BE YE MAN YT SPARES THES STONES,

AND CVRST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.

He gave the world his works, and his good fellowship, not his body or his name.

The mourners carried small bunches of rosemary or bay to throw into the grave which, to this day, is visited by thousands of admirers and pilgrims.

CHAPTER 91. To Heare the Story of Your Life

He died as he had lived, without much sign of the world’s attention. When Ben Jonson expired his funeral procession included “all of the nobility and gentry then in the town.”¹ Only Shakespeare’s family and closest friends followed his bier to the grave. There were scant tributes paid to his memory by other dramatists, and the commendatory verses in the Folio of 1623 are slight indeed compared to the copious verse epistles on the deaths of Jonson, Fletcher and other fashionable playwrights. There were no books by Shakespeare in Jonson’s library. Shakespeare neither established nor encouraged any school of younger “disciples.”

It was only after half a century that the first biographical notices appeared, and no scholar or critic bothered to discuss Shakespeare with any of his friends or contemporaries. This may preface Emerson’s remark that “Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare.”² He is one of those rare cases of a writer whose work is singularly important and influential, yet whose personality was not considered to be of any interest at all. He is obscure and elusive precisely to the extent that nobody bothered to write about him.

Yet the range of Shakespeare’s influence is not hard to discern. More than seventy issues and editions of his work appeared in his lifetime. By 1660 no fewer than nineteen of his plays had been published, and by 1680 there had been three editions of his collected plays. Theatrical reports suggest that, in hard times, the King’s Men supported themselves by replaying Shakespeare’s “old” dramas. Other playwrights, including Massinger and Middleton, Ford and Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, were drawn to imitate him. Othello and Romeo and Juliet were particularly influential among younger dramatists, and the figures of Hamlet and of Falstaff maintained their theatrical life and presence outside the plays in which they had originally appeared. Shakespeare also seems almost single-handedly to have maintained the status of the revenge tragedy and the romance. He was a hard writer to ignore.

On the occasion of the Shakespeare Jubilee, in the summer of 1769, a painting was hung before the windows of the room where the dramatist was supposed to have been born; it displayed the image of the sun breaking through clouds. It is a wonderful emblem of birth. But it also suggests revival and return. If at a later date that sun had shone through another window of the house in Henley Street its rays would have been refracted through a score of different names, where distinguished nineteenth-century visitors had scratched or scored their signatures upon the glass. Among them are Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, all of them registering the fact that they were shining within the light of Shakespeare himself.

The Folio or collected volume of his plays followed some seven years after his death. It was assembled by two of his fellows, John Heminges and Henry Condell, and was dedicated to the two Pembroke brothers. The Earl of Pembroke was Lord Chamberlain and the direct superior of the Master of the Revels. It served its purpose very well, and was for three centuries believed to represent the Shakespearian “canon” of thirty-six plays with the notable exclusion of certain collaborative ventures such as Pericles (later added) and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The fact that a list of the actors was added at the beginning suggests that this was as much a theatrical as a literary celebration. It may have been the subject of discussion among Shakespeare and his colleagues before his death, and it is even possible that some of the plays were printed from a revised transcript by the playwright himself. Many of them, however, are in the hand of a professional scrivener named Ralph Crane who was often employed by the theatrical companies. The volume is adorned by the Droeshout engraving of the dramatist, which is indeed the only generally accepted likeness of William Shakespeare.