by Bill Bryson
Nothing is known of the relationship between Shakespeare and Fletcher. It may well be that they worked separately, or it may be that Fletcher was given unfinished manuscripts to complete after Shakespeare’s retirement. Wells, however, thinks that the careful flow of the plays suggests they worked together closely.
The Two Noble Kinsmen, though almost certainly performed while Shakespeare was still alive, is unknown before 1634, when it was published with a title page attributing it jointly to Fletcher and Shakespeare. Henry VIII and Cardenio are also ascribed to Fletcher and Shakespeare jointly. Cardenio was based on a character in Don Quixote and was never published, it seems, though it was registered for publication in 1653 as being by “Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare.” A manuscript copy of the play is thought to have been held by a museum in Covent Garden, London, but unfortunately the museum went up in flames in 1808 and took the manuscript with it. Fletcher died in 1625 of the plague and was buried with—literally with—his fellow playwright and sometime collaborator Massinger. Today they lie in the chancel of Southwark Cathedral beside the grave of Shakespeare’s young brother Edmund.
Shakespeare may also have collaborated much earlier on Edward III, published anonymously in 1596. Some authorities think at least some of the play is Shakespeare’s, though the matter is much in dispute. Timon of Athens was probably written with Thomas Middleton. Stanley Wells suggests a date of 1605, while stressing that it is very uncertain. George Peele is also mentioned often as a probable collaborator on Titus Andronicus.
“Shakespeare became a different kind of writer as he got older—still brilliant, but more challenging,” Stanley Wells told me in an interview. “His language became more dense and elliptical. He became less inclined to consider the needs and interests of the traditional audience. The plays became less theatrical, more introverted. He was perhaps a bit out of fashion in his last years. Even now his later plays—Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Coriolanus—are less popular than those of his middle period.”
His output was clearly declining in pace. He seems to have written nothing at all after 1613, the year the Globe burned down. But he did still evidently make trips to London. In 1613, he bought a house in Blackfriars for the very substantial sum of £140, evidently as an investment. Interestingly he made the purchase more complicated than necessary by taking out a mortgage that involved the oversight of three trustees—his colleague John Heminges, his friend Thomas Pope, and William Johnson, landlord of the famous Mermaid Tavern. (This is, incidentally, the only known connection Shakespeare had to that famous tavern, legend notwithstanding.) One consequence of making the purchase in this way was that it kept the property from passing to Shakespeare’s widow, Anne, upon his death. Instead it went to the trustees. Why Shakespeare would wish this, as so much else, can only be a matter for conjecture.
Chapter Eight
Death
IN LATE MARCH 1616, William Shakespeare made some changes to his will. It is tempting to suppose that he was unwell and probably dying. Certainly he appears not to have been himself. His signatures are shaky and the will bears certain signs of confusion: He could not evidently recall the names of his brother-in-law Thomas Hart or of one of Hart’s sons—though it is equally odd that none of the five witnesses supplied these details either. Why, come to that, Shakespeare required that many witnesses is a puzzle. Two was the usual number.
It was an unhappily eventful time in Shakespeare’s life. A month earlier his daughter Judith had married a local vintner of dubious character named Thomas Quiney. Judith was thirty-one years old and her matrimonial prospects were in all likelihood fading swiftly. In any case she appears to have chosen poorly, for just over a month after their marriage Quiney was fined 5 shillings for unlawful fornication with one Margaret Wheeler—a very considerable humiliation for his new bride and her family. Worse, Miss Wheeler died giving birth to Quiney’s child, adding tragedy to scandal.
As if this weren’t enough, on April 17 Will’s brother-in-law Hart, a hatter, died, leaving his sister Joan a widow. Six days later William Shakespeare himself died from causes unknown. Months don’t get much worse than that.
Shakespeare’s will resides today in a box in a special locked room at Britain’s National Archives at Kew in London. The will is written on three sheets of parchment, each of a different size, and bears three of Shakespeare’s six known signatures, one on each page. It is a strikingly dry piece of work, “absolutely void of the least particle of that Spirit which Animated Our great Poet,” wrote the Reverend Joseph Greene of Stratford, the antiquary who rediscovered the will in 1747 and was frankly disappointed in its lack of affection.
Shakespeare left £350 in cash plus four houses and their contents and a good deal of land—worth a little under £1,000 all together, it has been estimated—a handsome and respectable estate, though by no means a great one. His bequests were mostly straightforward: To his sister he left £20 in cash and the use of the family home on Henley Street for the rest of her life; to each of her three children (including the one whose name he could not recall) he left £5. He also left Joan his clothes. Though clothing had value, it was extremely unusual, according to David Thomas, for it to be left to someone of the opposite sex. Presumably Shakespeare could think of no one else who might welcome it.
The most famous line in the document appears on the third page, where to the original text is added an interlineation, which says, a touch tersely: “I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture” (that is, the bedclothes). The will does not otherwise mention Shakespeare’s widow. Scholars have long argued over what can be concluded about their relationship from this.
Beds and bedding were valued objects and often mentioned in wills. It is sometimes argued that the second-best bed was the marital bed—the first bed being reserved for important visitors—and therefore replete with tender associations. But Thomas says the evidence doesn’t bear this out and that husbands virtually always gave the best bed to their wives or eldest sons. A second-best bed, he believes, was inescapably a demeaning bequest. It is sometimes pointed out that as a widow Anne would automatically have been entitled to one-third of Shakespeare’s estate, and therefore it wasn’t necessary for him to single her out for particular bequests. But even allowing for this, it is highly unusual for a spouse to be included so tersely as an afterthought.
A colleague of Thomas’s, Jane Cox, now retired, made a study of sixteenth-century wills and found that typically husbands said tender things about their wives—Condell, Heminges, and Augustine Phillips all did—and frequently left them some special remembrance. Shakespeare does neither, but then, as Samuel Schoenbaum notes, he offers “no endearing references to other family members either.” With respect to Anne, Thomas suggests that perhaps she was mentally incapacitated. Then again it may be that Shakespeare was simply too ill to include endearments. Thomas thinks it’s possible that Shakespeare’s signatures on the will were forged—probably not for any nefarious reason, but simply because he was too ill to wield a quill himself. If the signatures are not genuine, it would be something of a shock to the historical record, as the will contains half of Shakespeare’s six known signatures.
He left £10 to the poor of Stratford, which is sometimes suggested as being a touch niggardly, but in fact according to Thomas it was quite generous. A more usual sum for a man of his position was £2. He also left 20 shillings to a godson and small sums to various friends, including (in yet another interlineation) 26 shillings apiece to Heminges, Condell, and Richard Burbage to purchase memorial rings—a common gesture. All the rest went to his two daughters, the bulk to Susanna.
Apart from the second-best bed and the clothes he left to Joan, only two other personal possessions are mentioned—a gilt-and-silver bowl and a ceremonial sword. Judith was given the bowl. The likelihood is that it sits today unrecognized on some suburban sideboard; it was not the sort of object that gets discarded. The sword was left to a local friend, Thomas Combe; its fate is similarly unknown.
It is generally assumed that Shakespeare’s interests in the Globe and Blackfriars theaters had been sold already, for there is no mention of them. The full inventory of his estate, listing his books and much else of value to history, would have been sent to London, where in all likelihood it perished in the Great Fire of 1666. No trace of it survives.
Shakespeare’s wife died in August 1623, just before the publication of the First Folio. His daughter Susanna lived on until 1649, when she died aged sixty-six. His younger daughter, Judith, lived till 1662, and died aged seventy-seven. She had three children, including a son named Shakespeare, but all predeceased her without issue. “Judith was the great lost opportunity,” says Stanley Wells. “If any of Shakespeare’s early biographers had sought her out, she could have told them all kinds of things that we would now dearly love to know. But no one, it appears, troubled to speak to her.” Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth, who equally might have shed light on many Shakespearean mysteries, lived until 1670. She married twice but had no children either, and so with her died the Shakespeare line.
Theaters boomed in the years just after Shakespeare’s death, even more so than they had in his lifetime. By 1631, seventeen of them were in operation around London. The good years didn’t last long, however. By 1642, when the Puritans shut them down, just six remained—three amphitheaters and three halls. Theaters would never again appeal to so wide a spectrum of society or be such a universal pastime.
Shakespeare’s plays might have been lost, too, had it not been for the heroic efforts of his close friends and colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, who seven years after his death produced a folio edition of his complete works. It put into print for the first time eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays: Macbeth; The Tempest; Julius Caesar; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Measure for Measure; The Comedy of Errors; As You Like It; The Taming of the Shrew; King John; All’s Well That Ends Well; Twelfth Night; The Winter’s Tale; Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VIII; Coriolanus; Cymbeline; Timon of Athens; and Antony and Cleopatra. Had Heminges and Condell not taken this trouble, the likelihood is that all of these plays would have been lost to us. Now that is true heroism.
Heminges and Condell were the last of the original Chamberlain’s Men. As with nearly everyone else in this story, we know only a little about them. Heminges (Kermode makes it Heminge; others use Heming or Hemings) was the company’s business manager, but also a sometime actor and, at least according to tradition, is said to have been the first Falstaff—though he is also said to have had a stutter, “an unfortunate handicap for an actor,” as Wells notes. He listed himself in his will as a “citizen and grocer of London.” A grocer in Shakespeare’s day was a trader in bulk items, not someone who sold provisions from a shop (think of gross, not groceries). In any case the designation meant only that he belonged to the grocers’ guild, not that he was actively involved in the trade. He had thirteen children, possibly fourteen, by his wife, Rebecca, widow of the actor William Knell, whose murder at Thame in 1587, it may be recalled, left a vacancy among the Queen’s Men into which some commentators have been eager to place a young William Shakespeare.
Condell (or sometimes Cundell, as on his will) was an actor, esteemed evidently for comedic roles. Like Shakespeare he invested wisely and was sufficiently wealthy to style himself “gentleman” without fear of contradiction and to own a country home in what was then the outlying village of Fulham. He left Heminges a generous £5 in his will—considerably more than Shakespeare left Heminges, Condell, and Burbage together in his. Condell had nine children. He and Heminges lived as neighbors in Saint Mary Aldermanbury, within the City walls, for thirty-two years.
After Shakespeare’s death they set to putting together the complete works—a matter of no small toil. They must have been influenced by the example of Ben Jonson, who in the year of Shakespeare’s death, 1616, had issued a handsome folio of his own work—a decidedly vain and daring thing to do since plays were not normally considered worthy of such grand commemoration. Jonson rather pugnaciously styled the book his “Workes,” prompting one waggish observer to wonder if he had lost the ability to distinguish between work and play.
We have no idea how long Heminges and Condell’s project took, but Shakespeare had been dead for seven years by the time the volume was ready for publication in the autumn of 1623. It was formally called Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, but has been known to the world ever since—well, nearly ever since—as the First Folio.
A folio, from the Latin folium, or “leaf,” is a book in which each sheet has been folded just once down the middle, creating two leaves or four pages. A folio page is therefore quite large—typically about fifteen inches high. A quarto book is one in which each sheet is folded twice, to create four leaves—hence “quarto”—or eight pages.
The First Folio was published by Edward Blount and the father-and-son team of William and Isaac Jaggard—a curious choice, since the senior Jaggard had earlier published the book of poems The Passionate Pilgrim, which the title page ascribed to William Shakespeare, though in fact Shakespeare’s only contribution was a pair of sonnets and three poems lifted whole from Love’s Labour’s Lost, suggesting that the entire enterprise may have been unauthorized and thus potentially irksome to Shakespeare. At all events, by the time of the First Folio, William Jaggard was so ill that he almost certainly didn’t participate in the printing.
Publication was not a decision to be taken lightly. Folios were big books and expensive to produce, so the First Folio was very ambitiously priced at £1 (for an edition bound in calfskin; unbound copies were a little cheaper). A copy of the sonnets, by comparison, cost just 5 pence on publication—or one forty-eighth the price of a folio. Even so the First Folio did well and was followed by second, third, and fourth editions in 1632, 1663–1664, and 1685.
The idea of the First Folio was not just to publish plays that had not before been seen in print but to correct and restore those that had appeared in corrupt or careless versions. Heminges and Condell had the great advantage that they had worked with Shakespeare throughout his career and could hardly have been more intimately acquainted with his work. To aid recollection they had much valuable material to work with—promptbooks, foul papers (as rough drafts or original copies were known) in Shakespeare’s own hand, and the company’s own fair copies—all now lost.
Before the First Folio all that existed of Shakespeare’s plays were cheap quarto editions of exceedingly variable quality—twelve of them traditionally deemed to be “good” and nine deemed “bad.” Good quartos are clearly based on at least reasonably faithful copies of plays; bad ones are generally presumed to be “memorial reconstructions”—that is, versions set down from memory (often very bad memory, it seems) by fellow actors or scribes employed to attend a play and create as good a transcription as they could manage. Bad quartos could be jarring indeed. Here is a sample of Hamlet’s soliloquy as rendered by a bad quarto:
To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all.:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an everlasting Judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned…
Heminges and Condell proudly consigned to the scrap heap all these bad versions—the “diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors,” as they put it in their introduction to the volume—and diligently restored Shakespeare’s plays to their “True Originall” condition. The plays were now, in their curious phrase, “cur’d, and perfect of their limbes”—or so they boasted. In fact, however, the First Folio was a decidedly erratic piece of work.
Even to an inexpert eye its typographical curiosities are striking. Stray words appear in odd places—a large and eminently superfluous “THE” stands near the bottom of page 38, for instance—page numbering is wildly inconsistent
, and there are many notable misprints. In one section, pages 81 and 82 appear twice, but pages 77–78, 101–108, and 157–256 don’t appear at all. In Much Ado About Nothing the lines of Dogberry and Verges abruptly cease being prefixed by the characters’ names and instead become prefixed by “Will” and “Richard,” the names of the actors who took the parts in the original production—an understandable lapse at the time of performance but hardly an indication of tight editorial control when the play was reprinted years later.
The plays are sometimes divided into acts and scenes but sometimes not; in Hamlet the practice of scene division is abandoned halfway through. Character lists are sometimes at the front of plays, sometimes at the back, and sometimes missing altogether. Stage directions are sometimes comprehensive and at other times almost entirely absent. A crucial line of dialogue in King Lear is preceded by the abbreviated character name “Cor.,” but it is impossible to know whether “Cor.” refers to Cornwall or Cordelia. Either one works, but each gives a different shading to the play. The issue has troubled directors ever since.
But these are, it must be said, the most trifling of bleats when we consider where we would otherwise be. “Without the Folio,” Anthony James West has written, “Shakespeare’s history plays would have lacked their beginning and their end, his only Roman play would have been Titus Andronicus, and there would have been three, not four, ‘great tragedies.’ Shorn of these eighteen plays, Shakespeare would not have been the pre-eminent dramatist that he is now.”
Heminges and Condell are unquestionably the greatest literary heroes of all time. It really does bear repeating: only about 230 plays survive from the period of Shakespeare’s life, of which the First Folio represents some 15 percent, so Heminges and Condell saved for the world not only half the plays of William Shakespeare, but an appreciable portion of all Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
