Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak

  With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory

  Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up

  The pine and cedar; graves at my command

  Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth

  By my so potent art. But this rough magic

  I here abjure.

  (5.1.41–51)

  If these words belong not only to Prospero but also to Prospero’s creator, if they reflect what Shakespeare felt in contemplating retirement, then they mark a sense both of personal loss and of personal evolution. In King Lear retirement had seemed an unmitigated catastrophe; in The Tempest it seems a viable and proper action. In both cases, to be sure, the action is understood as an acknowledgment of mortality: Lear says that he will “Unburthened crawl toward death” (1.1.39); Prospero says that when he returns to Milan, “Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.315). Although, as his investment in long-term annuities suggests, Shakespeare himself expected that he would live much longer than in fact he did, he was clear-eyed about what lay on the far side of his decision. Yet in The Tempest, Prospero’s decision to give up his “potent art” and return to the place of his origin is not only or even principally about exhaustion and the anticipation of death. The magician in fact knows that he is at the height of his powers: “My high charms work” (3.3.88). His choice—the breaking of the staff, the drowning of the book “deeper than did ever plummet sound” (5.1.56), and the voyage home—is represented not as weakness but as a moral triumph.

  It is a triumph in part because it marks Prospero’s decision not to exact vengeance against those who have injured him—“The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance” (5.1.27–28)—and in part because something about the power that Prospero wields, though wielded in the name of justice and legitimacy, order and restoration, is dangerous. In what does the power consist? Creating and destroying worlds. Bringing men and women into an experimental space and arousing their passions. Awakening intense anxiety in all the creatures he encounters and forcing them to confront what is hidden within them. Bending people to serve him. Prospero’s charms do not work on everyone—his brother Antonio seems singularly unaffected—but for those on whom it does work, it is potentially destructive as well as redemptive. In any case, it is an excess of power, more than an ordinary mortal should have.

  The clearest sign of that excess comes in the tremendous speech abjuring his “rough magic.” Since the play opens with Prospero arousing an enormous storm, his specific allusion to that particular magical power makes theatrical sense, but he goes on at once to claim and to renounce something else:

  graves at my command

  Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth

  By my so potent art.

  (5.1.48–50)

  This was for Shakespeare’s culture the most feared and dangerous form of magic, the sign of diabolical powers. It is not something Prospero, the benign magus, has actually done in the course of The Tempest, nor it is something that his own account of his life would lead us to imagine him doing. But as a description of the work of the playwright, rather than the magician, it is unnervingly accurate. It is not Prospero but Shakespeare who has commanded old Hamlet to burst from the grave and who has brought back to life the unjustly accused Hermione. Shakespeare’s business throughout his career had been to awaken the dead.

  At the end of The Tempest, in an epilogue rare in Shakespeare’s work, Prospero steps forward, still in character, but stripped of his magical powers:

  Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

  And what strength I have’s mine own,

  Which is most faint.

  (lines 1–3)

  He has become an ordinary man, and he needs help. He is asking for applause and cheers—the theatrical premise, still tied by a thread to the plot, is that the audience’s hands and breath will fill his sails and enable him to return home—but the terms in which he does so are peculiarly intense. The appeal for applause turns into an appeal for prayer:

  Now I want

  Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

  And my ending is despair

  Unless I be relieved by prayer,

  Which pierces so, that it assaults

  Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

  As you from crimes would pardoned be,

  Let your indulgence set me free.

  (lines 13–20)

  For Prospero, whose morality and legitimacy are repeatedly insisted upon, this guilt does not make entire sense, but it might have made sense for the playwright who peers out from behind the mask of the prince. What did it mean to do what Shakespeare had done? Why, if he is implicated in the figure of his magician hero, might he feel compelled to plead for indulgence, as if he were asking to be pardoned for a crime he had committed? The whiff of criminality is just a fantasy, of course, but it is a peculiar fantasy, of a piece with the hint of necromancy—“Th’expense of spirit,” to use a phrase from the sonnets, “in a waste of shame” (129.1).

  Against a background of personal caution, prudential calculation, and parsimoniousness, Shakespeare had built his career on acts of compulsive identification, the achievement of petty thefts coupled with an immense imaginative generosity. Though he had in his own affairs kept himself from the fate of Marlowe or Greene, he had in the playhouse trafficked in reckless passion and in subversive ideas. He had turned everything life had dealt him—painful crises of social standing, sexuality, and religion—into the uses of art and had turned that art into profit. He had managed even to transform his grief and perplexity at the death of his son into an aesthetic resource, the brilliant practice of strategic opacity. Is it surprising that his pride in what he had accomplished—he comes before us not as one of what A Midsummer Night’s Dream calls “rude mechanicals” (3.2.9) but as prince and a learned magician—was mingled at the end with guilt?

  Perhaps too he had slowly wearied of his own popular success or had come to question its worth. He had, as a performer and a playwright, appealed again and again for applause, and he must have been gratified that he generally received it. But if he fully knew who he was—and the figure of the princely magician suggests that Shakespeare understood what it meant to be Shakespeare—then he may have decided that he had had enough. He would finally be able to turn away from the crowd.

  To judge from the pattern of Shakespeare’s investments, the thought that he would leave the theater someday must have been with him for a long time. And because virtually all of these investments, apart from those in the playhouse, were in and around Stratford, he must have long harbored the dream that he eventually attempted to realize: he would leave London and return home. He had gone back again and again over the years, of course, but this return would be decisively different. He would give up his rented rooms, pack up his belongings, and actually take possession of the fine house and the barns and the arable lands he had purchased. He would pull back from the peddling of fantasies, or, rather, such playwriting as he might continue to do would now become a sideline, as the real estate had once been a sideline. Living with his aging wife and unmarried daughter, Judith; spending time with his beloved daughter Susanna, her husband, John Hall, and his granddaughter, Elizabeth; watching over his property, participating in local quarrels; visiting with old friends, he would be a respected Stratford gentleman, no more nor less.

  But the closer he came to making this decision, the more his whole lifework seemed to flood back over him. The central preoccupations of almost all his plays are there in The Tempest: the story of brother betraying brother; the corrosive power of envy; the toppling of a legitimate ruler; the dangerous passage from civility to the wilderness; the dream of restoration; the wooing of a beautiful young heiress in ignorance of her social position; the strategy of manipulating people by means of art, especially through the staging of miniature plays-within-plays; the cunning deployment of magical powers; the tension between nature a
nd nurture; the father’s pain at giving his daughter to her suitor; the threat of social death and the collapse of identity; the overwhelming, transformative experience of wonder. The startling revelation of this very late play is that nothing of Shakespeare’s immense imaginative life was actually lost. There is a famous song in The Tempest about the body of a drowned man:

  Full fathom five thy father lies.

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes;

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  (1.2.400–405)

  The same is true of Shakespeare’s poetic imagination: nothing had faded—all that had happened over the decades was that the bones of his works had suffered a sea change into something rich and strange.

  How could Shakespeare give all of this up? The answer is that he couldn’t, at least not entirely. When he actually left London is not known. He may have moved back to Stratford as early as 1611, just after he finished The Tempest, but he did not cut all of his ties. He was no longer overwhelmingly present, but he collaborated with John Fletcher on at least three plays. And in March 1613 he made the last of his real estate investments, not this time in Stratford, but in London. For the large sum of £140 (£80 of which was in cash), he purchased a “dwelling house or tenement” built over one of the great gatehouses of the old Blackfriars priory. This was precisely the kind of dwelling that he could have bought, had he wished his wife and children to live with him in London, during the long years of his professional life there. But it was only now that he had returned to Stratford that he decided he wanted to own something in the city. Though his Blackfriars house was in hailing distance of the Blackfriars Theater and close too to Puddle Wharf, where boats could take him quickly across the river to the Globe, Shakespeare does not seem to have bought it to live in. He may have arranged to stay there during his trips back to London—to see the plays on which he had collaborated or to conduct business—but he rented it to someone named John Robinson. Still, he owned something in the place where he had wielded his magical powers.

  The transaction by which Shakespeare acquired title to the Blackfriars property was an odd and very complex one, involving three official co-purchasers who put up no money—it was Shakespeare alone who did so—but who were appointed as trustees. The only plausible explanation that has ever been offered is that the arrangement was an elaborate contrivance designed to keep his wife, Anne, from having any dower rights to the property should she outlive him. Did Anne know that her husband had set up the purchase in this way, or was it to be an unpleasant surprise, along with the second-best bed? We do not know, but all signs indicate that Shakespeare’s return to Stratford, his decision to embrace the ordinary, was not an easy one.

  At the very beginning of July 1613, only a few months after he completed the expensive Blackfriars purchase, news would have reached Shakespeare of a disaster that must have had a powerful impact upon him: on June 29, during a performance of the new play he had co-authored with Fletcher, the Globe Theater—the structure he himself had helped to build back in the winter of 1599—had burned to the ground. Here, in a letter written three days after the event, is a version of the account that would have quickly been brought to Stratford:

  The King’s players had a new play, called All is true, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII, which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order with their Georges and garters, the Guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now, King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain chambers [i.e., small 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 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.

  No injuries or deaths, then, but a severe financial blow to the sharers in the King’s Men and to the “housekeepers” of the playhouse, a blow that fell with particular force upon Shakespeare himself, who was both a sharer and a housekeeper. It could have been much worse: the company’s costumes and its jealously guarded playbooks were saved. If these had not been quickly carried out of harm’s way, the King’s Men might well have been ruined, for the costumes represented a huge investment and many of the playbooks may well have been the sole complete copies. A more rapidly moving fire could have meant that half of Shakespeare’s plays—those that had not already appeared in quartos—would never have found their way into print.

  Still, it was bad enough. This was a world without disaster insurance, and the cost of rebuilding the playhouse would have to be shouldered by Shakespeare and the other owners. Even though he was a relatively wealthy man, this was precisely the kind of outlay of capital that Shakespeare, having left London and distanced himself from the daily operation of the King’s Men, would not have wished to make, and he may well have decided to get out there and then. As there is no mention in his last will and testament of the valuable shares he held in the playing company and the Globe, he must have liquidated those assets earlier, though the record of the transaction, and hence the precise date, is lost. If, as seems likely, he sold the shares in the wake of the fire, Shakespeare would have made still more decisive his act of retirement.

  Near the end of The Tempest, Prospero, declaring that “Our revels now are ended,” abruptly breaks off the wedding masque he has, through his magical powers, created for his daughter and son-in-law. The actors, he explains,

  were all spirits, and

  Are melted into air, into thin air;

  And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind.

  (4.1.148–56)

  In the summer of 1613, these lines must have seemed in retrospect eerily prophetic: the great Globe itself had indeed dissolved. Shakespeare had been haunted all his life by a sense of the insubstantiality of things—it is the almost inescapable burden of the actor’s profession—and the fire only made literal what he already knew and what his magician hero had declared:

  We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  (4.1.56–58)

  The building itself, of course, could always be rebuilt—the Globe was up and running again in a year’s time—but its fragility was one sign among many that Shakespeare, reaching his fiftieth birthday in 1614, could read in himself and in his world. His brother Gilbert died in 1612, at the age of forty-five; a year later his brother Richard died just shy of his fortieth birthday. Shakespeare’s mother, Mary, had brought eight children into the world; only two of them, Will and his younger sister Joan, were still alive. For us, fifty is an age of undiminished vigor, and even then it was hardly ancient, but Shakespeare seems to have thought of himself as well struck in years and may have drawn from his own inner life Prospero’s strange remark: “Every third thought shall be my grave.”

  Perhaps it was precisely this acknowledgment of evanescence that made Shakespeare hold on all the more tenaciously to the very substantial assets he had accumulated in the course of his life. Three wealthy landowners, Arthur Mainwaring, William Replingham, and William Combe, came u
p with a scheme to enclose substantial acreage near Stratford, including some of the land in which Shakespeare was a titheholder. Enclosure—rationalizing the jumble of small holdings and common fields, concentrating holdings, building fences, taking some of the land out of tillage to allow systematic, profitable sheep grazing—was a popular economic strategy for the very rich, but it was generally hated by those less wealthy. It tended to make grain prices rise, overturn customary rights, reduce employment, take away alms for the poor, and create social unrest. To its credit, the Stratford Corporation vigorously opposed the enclosure scheme. Since Shakespeare’s tithes were potentially at risk, he could have been expected to join the opposition, which was led by his cousin Thomas Greene, the town clerk.

  A memo Greene jotted down of a conversation held on November 17, 1614, provides a vivid glimpse of the ordinary world, in its grainy detail, in which Shakespeare was fully immersed. He had imagined kings and princes carving up huge territories:

  Of all these bounds, even from this line to this,

  With shadowy forests and with champains riched,

  With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads,

  We make thee lady.

  (King Lear, 1.1.61–64)

  But it was now on a far different scale and for different stakes that he was operating.

  At my cousin Shakespeare, coming yesterday to town, I went to see him how he did. He told me that they assured him they meant to enclose no further than to Gospel Bush and so up straight (leaving out part of the dingles to the field) to the gate in Clopton hedge, and take in Salisbury’s piece. And that they mean in April to survey the land and then to give satisfaction, and not before. And he and Mr. Hall say they think there will be nothing done at all.