The costumes were the most important visual dimension of the play. Playwrights were paid between £2 and £6 per script, whereas Alleyn was not averse to paying £20 for “a black velvet cloak with sleeves embroidered all with silver and gold.” No matter the period of the play, actors always wore contemporary costume. The excitement for the audience came not from any impression of historical accuracy, but from the richness of the attire and perhaps the transgressive thrill of the knowledge that here were commoners like themselves strutting in the costumes of courtiers in effective defiance of the strict sumptuary laws whereby in real life people had to wear the clothes that befitted their social station.
To an even greater degree than props, costumes could carry symbolic importance. Racial characteristics could be suggested: a breastplate and helmet for a Roman soldier, a turban for a Turk, long robes for exotic characters such as Moors, a gabardine for a Jew. The figure of Time, as in The Winter’s Tale, would be equipped with hourglass, scythe, and wings; Rumour, who speaks the prologue of 2 Henry IV, wore a costume adorned with a thousand tongues. The wardrobe in the tiring-house of the Globe would have contained much of the same stock as that of rival manager Philip Henslowe at the Rose: green gowns for outlaws and foresters, black for melancholy men such as Jaques and people in mourning such as the Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well (at the beginning of Hamlet, the prince is still in mourning black when everyone else is in festive garb for the wedding of the new king), a gown and hood for a friar (or a feigned friar like the duke in Measure for Measure), blue coats and tawny to distinguish the followers of rival factions, a leather apron and ruler for a carpenter (as in the opening scene of Julius Caesar—and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where this is the only sign that Peter Quince is a carpenter), a cockle hat with staff and a pair of sandals for a pilgrim or palmer (the disguise assumed by Helen in All’s Well), bodices and kirtles with farthingales beneath for the boys who are to be dressed as girls. A gender switch such as that of Rosalind or Jessica seems to have taken between fifty and eighty lines of dialogue—Viola does not resume her “maiden weeds,” but remains in her boy’s costume to the end of Twelfth Night because a change would have slowed down the action at just the moment it was speeding to a climax. Henslowe’s inventory also included “a robe for to go invisible”: Oberon, Puck, and Ariel must have had something similar.
As the costumes appealed to the eyes, so there was music for the ears. Comedies included many songs. Desdemona’s willow song, perhaps a late addition to the text, is a rare and thus exceptionally poignant example from tragedy. Trumpets and tuckets sounded for ceremonial entrances, drums denoted an army on the march. Background music could create atmosphere, as at the beginning of Twelfth Night, during the lovers’ dialogue near the end of The Merchant of Venice, when the statue seemingly comes to life in The Winter’s Tale, and for the revival of Pericles and of Lear (in the Quarto text, but not the Folio). The haunting sound of the hautboy suggested a realm beyond the human, as when the god Hercules is imagined deserting Mark Antony. Dances symbolized the harmony of the end of a comedy—though in Shakespeare’s world of mingled joy and sorrow, someone is usually left out of the circle.
The most important resource was, of course, the actors themselves. They needed many skills: in the words of one contemporary commentator, “dancing, activity, music, song, elocution, ability of body, memory, skill of weapon, pregnancy of wit.” Their bodies were as significant as their voices. Hamlet tells the player to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action”: moments of strong emotion, known as “passions,” relied on a repertoire of dramatic gestures as well as a modulation of the voice. When Titus Andronicus has had his hand chopped off, he asks, “How can I grace my talk, / Wanting a hand to give it action?” A pen portrait of “The Character of an Excellent Actor” by the dramatist John Webster is almost certainly based on his impression of Shakespeare’s leading man, Richard Burbage: “By a full and significant action of body, he charms our attention: sit in a full theatre, and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears, whiles the actor is the centre.…”
Though Burbage was admired above all others, praise was also heaped upon the apprentice players whose alto voices fitted them for the parts of women. A spectator at Oxford in 1610 records how the audience were reduced to tears by the pathos of Desdemona’s death. The puritans who fumed about the biblical prohibition upon cross-dressing and the encouragement to sodomy constituted by the sight of an adult male kissing a teenage boy on stage were a small minority. Little is known, however, about the characteristics of the leading apprentices in Shakespeare’s company. It may perhaps be inferred that one was a lot taller than the other, since Shakespeare often wrote for a pair of female friends, one tall and fair, the other short and dark (Helena and Hermia, Rosalind and Celia, Beatrice and Hero).
We know little about Shakespeare’s own acting roles—an early allusion indicates that he often took royal parts, and a venerable tradition gives him old Adam in As You Like It and the ghost of old King Hamlet. Save for Burbage’s lead roles and the generic part of the clown, all such castings are mere speculation. We do not even know for sure whether the original Falstaff was Will Kempe or another actor who specialized in comic roles, Thomas Pope.
Kempe left the company in early 1599. Tradition has it that he fell out with Shakespeare over the matter of excessive improvisation. He was replaced by Robert Armin, who was less of a clown and more of a cerebral wit: this explains the difference between such parts as Lancelet Gobbo and Dogberry, which were written for Kempe, and the more verbally sophisticated Feste and Lear’s Fool, which were written for Armin.
One thing that is clear from surviving “plots” or storyboards of plays from the period is that a degree of doubling was necessary. 2 Henry VI has over sixty speaking parts, but more than half of the characters only appear in a single scene and most scenes have only six to eight speakers. At a stretch, the play could be performed by thirteen actors. When Thomas Platter saw Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599, he noted that there were about fifteen. Why doesn’t Paris go to the Capulet ball in Romeo and Juliet? Perhaps because he was doubled with Mercutio, who does. In The Winter’s Tale, Mamillius might have come back as Perdita and Antigonus been doubled by Camillo, making the partnership with Paulina at the end a very neat touch. Titania and Oberon are often played by the same pair as Hippolyta and Theseus, suggesting a symbolic matching of the rulers of the worlds of night and day, but it is questionable whether there would have been time for the necessary costume changes. As so often, one is left in a realm of tantalizing speculation.
THE KING’S MAN
On Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the new king, James I, who had held the Scottish throne as James VI since he had been an infant, immediately took the Lord Chamberlain’s Men under his direct patronage. Henceforth they would be the King’s Men, and for the rest of Shakespeare’s career they were favored with far more court performances than any of their rivals. There even seem to have been rumors early in the reign that Shakespeare and Burbage were being considered for knighthoods, an unprecedented honor for mere actors—and one that in the event was not accorded to a member of the profession for nearly three hundred years, when the title was bestowed upon Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearean actor of Queen Victoria’s reign.
Shakespeare’s productivity rate slowed in the Jacobean years, not because of age or some personal trauma, but because there were frequent outbreaks of plague, causing the theaters to be closed for long periods. The King’s Men were forced to spend many months on the road. Between November 1603 and 1608, they were to be found at various towns in the south and Midlands, though Shakespeare probably did not tour with them by this time. He had bought a large house back home in Stratford and was accumulating other property. He may indeed have stopped acting soon after the new king took the throne. With the London theaters closed so much of the time and a large repertoire on the stocks, Shakespeare seems to have
focused his energies on writing a few long and complex tragedies that could have been played on demand at court: Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline are among his longest and poetically grandest plays. Macbeth only survives in a shorter text, which shows signs of adaptation after Shakespeare’s death. The bitterly satirical Timon of Athens, apparently a collaboration with Thomas Middleton that may have failed on the stage, also belongs to this period. In comedy, too, he wrote longer and morally darker works than in the Elizabethan period, pushing at the very bounds of the form in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well.
From 1608 onward, when the King’s Men began occupying the indoor Blackfriars playhouse (as a winter house, meaning that they only used the outdoor Globe in summer?), Shakespeare turned to a more romantic style. His company had a great success with a revived and altered version of an old pastoral play called Mucedorus. It even featured a bear. The younger dramatist John Fletcher, meanwhile, sometimes working in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, was pioneering a new style of tragicomedy, a mix of romance and royalism laced with intrigue and pastoral excursions. Shakespeare experimented with this idiom in Cymbeline and it was presumably with his blessing that Fletcher eventually took over as the King’s Men’s company dramatist. The two writers apparently collaborated on three plays in the years 1612–14: a lost romance called Cardenio (based on the love-madness of a character in Cervantes’ Don Quixote), Henry VIII (originally staged with the title “All Is True”), and The Two Noble Kinsmen, a dramatization of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale.” These were written after Shakespeare’s two final solo-authored plays, The Winter’s Tale, a self-consciously old-fashioned work dramatizing the pastoral romance of his old enemy Robert Greene, and The Tempest, which at one and the same time drew together multiple theatrical traditions, diverse reading, and contemporary interest in the fate of a ship that had been wrecked on the way to the New World.
The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare’s career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero’s epilogue to The Tempest as Shakespeare’s personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing and litigation. But his London life also continued. In 1613 he made his first major London property purchase: a freehold house in the Blackfriars district, close to his company’s indoor theater. The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been written as late as 1614, and Shakespeare was in London on business a little over a year before he died of an unknown cause at home in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.
About half the sum of his works were published in his lifetime, in texts of variable quality. A few years after his death, his fellow actors began putting together an authorized edition of his complete Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. It appeared in 1623, in large “Folio” format. This collection of thirty-six plays gave Shakespeare his immortality. In the words of his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, who contributed two poems of praise at the start of the Folio, the body of his work made him “a monument without a tomb”:
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give …
He was not of an age, but for all time!
SHAKESPEARE’S WORKS: A CHRONOLOGY
1589–91 ? Arden of Faversham (possible part authorship)
1589–92 The Taming of the Shrew
1589–92 ? Edward the Third (possible part authorship)
1591 The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (element of coauthorship possible)
1591 The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (element of co-authorship probable)
1591–92 The Two Gentlemen of Verona
1591–92; perhaps revised 1594 The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (probably cowritten with, or revising an earlier version by, George Peele)
1592 The First Part of Henry the Sixth, probably with Thomas Nashe and others
1592/94 King Richard the Third
1593 Venus and Adonis (poem)
1593–94 The Rape of Lucrece (poem)
1593–1608 Sonnets (154 poems, published 1609 with A Lover’s Complaint, a poem of disputed authorship)
1592–94/1600–03 Sir Thomas More (a single scene for a play originally by Anthony Munday, with other revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood)
1594 The Comedy of Errors
1595 Love’s Labour’s Lost
1595–97 Love’s Labour’s Won (a lost play, unless the original title for another comedy)
1595–96 A Midsummer Night’s Dream
1595–96 The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
1595–96 King Richard the Second
1595–97 The Life and Death of King John (possibly earlier)
1596–97 The Merchant of Venice
1596–97 The First Part of Henry the Fourth
1597–98 The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
1598 Much Ado About Nothing
1598–99 The Passionate Pilgrim (20 poems, some not by Shakespeare)
1599 The Life of Henry the Fifth
1599 “To the Queen” (epilogue for a court performance)
1599 As You Like It
1599 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
1600–01 The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (perhaps revising an earlier version)
1600–01 The Merry Wives of Windsor (perhaps revising version of 1597–99)
1601 “Let the Bird of Loudest Lay” (poem, known since 1807 as “The Phoenix and Turtle” [turtledove])
1601 Twelfth Night, or What You Will
1601–02 The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida
1604 The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
1604 Measure for Measure
1605 All’s Well That Ends Well
1605 The Life of Timon of Athens, with Thomas Middleton
1605–06 The Tragedy of King Lear
1605–08 ? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy, mostly by Thomas Middleton)
1606 The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton)
1606–07 The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra
1608 The Tragedy of Coriolanus
1608 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with George Wilkins
1610 The Tragedy of Cymbeline
1611 The Winter’s Tale
1611 The Tempest
1612–13 Cardenio, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald)
1613 Henry VIII (All Is True), with John Fletcher
1613–14 The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher
KINGS AND QUEENS OF ENGLAND: FROM THE HISTORY PLAYS TO SHAKESPEARE’S LIFETIME
Lifespan Reign
Angevins:
Henry II 1133–1189 1154–1189
Richard I 1157–1199 1189–1199
John 1166–1216 1199–1216
Henry III 1207–1272 1216–1272
Edward I 1239–1307 1272–1307
Edward II 1284–1327 1307–1327 deposed
Edward III 1312–1377 1327–1377
Richard II 1367–1400 1377–1399 deposed
Lancastrians:
Henry IV 1367–1413 1399–1413
Henry V 1387–1422 1413–1422
Henry VI 1421–1471 1422–1461 and 1470–1471
Yorkists:
Edward IV 1442–1483 1461–1470 and 1471–1483
Edward V 1470–1483 1483 not crowned: deposed and assassinated
Richard III 1452–1485 1483–1485
Tudors:
Henry VII 1457–1509 1485–1509
Henry VIII 1491–1547 1509–1547
Edward VI 1537–1553 1547–1553
/> Jane 1537–1554 1553 not crowned: deposed and executed
Mary I 1516–1558 1553–1558
Philip of Spain 1527–1598 1554–1558 co-regent with Mary
Elizabeth I 1533–1603 1558–1603
Stuart:
James I 1566–1625 1603–1625 James VI of Scotland (1567–1625)
THE HISTORY BEHIND THE HISTORIES: A CHRONOLOGY
Square brackets indicate events that happen just outside a play’s timescale but are mentioned in the play.
FURTHER READING AND VIEWING
CRITICAL APPROACHES
Brooke, Nicholas, ed., Shakespeare: Richard II: A Casebook (1973). Invaluable collection of early criticism.
Coyle, Martin, ed., William Shakespeare: Richard II, Icon Critical Guides (1998). Informative introduction with useful collection of historical criticism of play.
Fanell, Kirby, ed., Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Richard II (1999). Useful collection of influential late twentieth-century essays.
Hattaway, Michael, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (2002). Excellent general introduction to the histories with illuminating essays on individual plays.
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