Contested Will

by James Shapiro

  Could he but have drawn his wit

  As well in brass, as he hath hit

  His face; the print would then surpass

  All, that was ever writ in brass.

  The Folio also included memorial verses, most famously Jonson’s own long poem ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author Mr William Shakespeare, and what He Hath Left Us’. Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges and ‘I.M.’ (probably James Mabbe) contributed poems as well. In his poem, Jonson links Shakespeare to his place of birth, addressing him as ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’, while Digges explicitly identifies the man who wrote the plays with the one who lies buried in Stratford:

  Shakespeare, at length thy pious fellows give

  The world thy Works; thy Works, by which, outlive

  Thy tomb, thy name must. When that stone is rent,

  And Time dissolves thy Stratford monument,

  Here we alive shall view thee still.

  The monument Digges mentions was already erected by 1623. If he hadn’t visited it himself, he may have heard about it from the players, for in 1622, members of the King’s Men were paid not to perform in Stratford-upon-Avon when passing through Shakespeare’s birthplace while touring. They must have known that the Puritan-leaning town had long been inhospitable to players; but they nonetheless paid Stratford-upon-Avon a visit, perhaps to pay their respects at the gravestone and monument of the man who had made their fortune.

  *

  After completing most of the research for this chapter, I came across one additional bit of evidence. Had I included every stray comment about Shakespeare made by other writers at the time, this chapter would have swelled to twice its size. But I thought I’d add one more, not only because it shows that evidence confirming Shakespeare’s authorship continues to be discovered, but also because it underscores that no matter how many documents turn up, there will always be those who continue to interpret them in light of an unprovable and fantastic hoax.

  William Camden’s 1590 edition of Britannia, written in Latin, contains a brief description of Stratford-upon-Avon. Camden describes (here rendered into English) how the town ‘owes all of its reputation to its two foster sons, John of Stratford, the Archbishop of Canterbury who built the church, and Hugh Clopton, the magistrate of London who began the stone bridge over the Avon supported by fourteen arches, not without very great expense’. There’s a copy of this book in the Huntington Library that was owned by Richard Hunt. Hunt, born around 1596 and educated at Oxford, went on to become vicar in Bishop’s Itchington, ten miles or so east of Stratford-upon-Avon. In this copy a reader, in all probability Hunt himself, had come across that passage and added, in Latin, next to the words about Stratford’s most famous sons: ‘et Gulielmo Shakespear Roscio planè nostro’ (‘and to William Shakespeare, truly our Roscius’). Roscius was a widely admired Roman actor who achieved great fame and amassed a considerable fortune before retiring from the stage. To compare someone to Roscius in Shakespeare’s day – as Thomas Nashe had praised Edward Alleyn of the Admiral’s Men in the 1590s – was to acknowledge that he was a star of the stage.

  The marginalia were discovered by Paul Altrocchi. But for Altrocchi, a committed Oxfordian, they only served to confirm, rather than refute, the idea that someone other than Shakespeare had written the plays:

  The annotation, likely written so soon after Shaksper of Stratford’s death in 1616, does confirm the remarkable early success of what Oxfordians view as William Cecil’s clever but monstrous connivance: forcing the genius Edward de Vere into pseudonymity and promoting the illiterate grain merchant and real estate speculator, William Shaksper of Stratford, into hoaxian prominence as the great poet and playwright, William Shakespeare.

  Debating such a conclusion is pointless, given the radically different assumptions governing how this document ought to be read.

  Virtually every piece of evidence offered by Shakespeare’s fellow writers has been similarly explained away. Sceptics now produce a handy chart, which first appeared in Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, that migrates from book to book, and from arguments for one new candidate for the authorship of the plays to another, denying that any literary evidence exists for Shakespeare’s authorship. It has taken on iconic status – now known simply by the acronym CLPE, ‘Chart of Literary Paper Evidence’. Price and her followers define authorship in such a way that Shakespeare is always narrowly excluded, if need be on semantic grounds. According to the CLPE, there’s no evidence of Shakespeare having had a direct relationship with a patron, though he wore the livery of the Lord Chamberlain, served King James both as a King’s Man and as a Groom of the Chamber, and directly addressed a patron, the Earl of Southampton, in the letters prefacing both Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. Price’s CLPE also insists that Shakespeare had no ‘Notice at death as a writer’. I’m not sure how those who wrote memorial tributes to him, or paid for or carved his monument, or laboured to create the Pavier editions or the First Folio, might feel about that. But according to the CLPE, time had apparently expired before all these memorial efforts were realised. And though Price knows that Shakespeare was a shareholder and therefore not paid directly for each play by his playing company (and knows about the imprese payment as well), her CLPE assures us that there is no evidence of his ‘having been paid to write’. Readers are invited to make up their own minds.

  Jacobean Shakespeare

  I was in London on 5 November 2008, Guy Fawkes Day, that time-honoured celebration of King James’s miraculous escape from a terrorist plot. There had been fireworks exploding in the skies of London all week, a legacy of four hundred years of bonfires and bells, though I wondered how much those setting off these explosives knew about what they were commemorating. I thought I’d pay my own respects to King James more quietly by viewing his portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. I passed through the Tudor galleries, rich in portraits of Elizabeth I and her courtiers, but became confused when I entered the next gallery and couldn’t find the familiar images of James and his courtiers, where they had long been displayed. I walked around in circles before finally asking a guard to direct me to the Jacobean portraits. He explained that they were temporarily in storage, their place now taken up by ‘Shakespeare and His Circle’. The King’s Men without the king felt a bit like Hamlet without the prince.

  Discouraged, I headed to Foyles, that wonderful bookshop, in search of recent books about King James – also in vain; only one was in stock. I couldn’t understand why historians, commercial publishers and booksellers had largely given up on someone who ruled in England for twenty-two years (after having reigned in Scotland for thirty-six). Adjoining shelves sagged under the weight of books about the Tudors, especially Queen Elizabeth. It was the same everywhere I turned: there was a popular television series on ‘The Tudors’ and any number of lavish films I could rent about Elizabeth – but not one sequel on her royal successor (the very subject, I later learned, of Ronald Hutton’s witty essay ‘Why Don’t the Stuarts Get Filmed?’).

  Shakespeare in Love is one of the most delightful movies ever made about Shakespeare. In one of its best scenes we get to watch Queen Elizabeth, played by Judi Dench, sitting in the galleries at the outdoor playhouse at a performance of Romeo and Juliet, and telling Shakespeare afterwards to come by the palace, ‘where we will speak some more’. Imagine replacing her in this scene with, say, Simon Russell Beale in the role of King James. It wouldn’t work. Though almost half of his creative life was spent as a King’s Man, Shakespeare has for the longest time been powerfully and irrevocably linked with Queen Elizabeth, so much so that we seem to have forgotten Ben Jonson’s even-handed recollection of how Shakespeare’s plays ‘so did take Eliza, and our James!’

  Things have been this way since at least the early eighteenth century, when writers began inventing an intimacy between playwright and queen that had no documentary foundation. In 1702, John Dennis claimed that The Merry Wives of Windsor ‘was written at her command’. A few years later, Nicholas
Rowe added that Elizabeth ‘without doubt gave him many gracious marks of her favour’. The last time anyone tried to establish a direct connection between Shakespeare and his other monarch was 1709, when Bernard Lintott wrote that ‘King James the First was pleased with his own hand to write an amicable letter to Mr Shakespeare; which letter, though now lost, remained long in the hands of Sir William D’Avenant, as a credible person now living can testify.’ No such letter has survived and it’s unlikely that it ever existed (D’Avenant also bragged that he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son). By the end of the eighteenth century, letters from James to Shakespeare were long forgotten; as the Ireland forgeries confirm, those from Elizabeth now captured the popular imagination. When it has been an article of faith for so long that Shakespeare was an Elizabethan writer, who can blame the Oxfordians for succumbing to the widespread conviction that Shakespeare’s plays were the creations of a Tudor playwright and restrict their story almost entirely to life under Elizabeth?

  We have also had drummed into us that he was Shakespeare of the Globe – though that playhouse was only built in the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign. Long forgotten are the other playing spaces in and around London in which he had built his reputation over the previous decade: the Theatre, the Curtain, Newington Butts, the Rose, Richmond, Whitehall, perhaps a brief stint at the Swan. I’m as blameworthy as the next in this respect, having spent years researching and writing about the construction of the Globe and what was taking place in the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign. The Globe has become an icon, a once-again familiar sight on Bankside in London. I’m not sure if it’s an urban legend, but I have heard that dozens of replicas of it have sprouted round the world.

  But had you asked anyone on the streets of London in the winter of 1610 where you could go to see Shakespeare’s latest play, there would have only been one answer: ‘Blackfriars.’ The Blackfriars Theatre means little today to most admirers of Shakespeare; so far as I know, only a single replica of it has ever been erected, in rural Virginia, which attracts both spectators and scholars. The story of the Blackfriars Theatre is also the story of the Jacobean Shakespeare, and of the particular challenges he faced toward the end of his playwriting career. And that, in turn, helps explain why only Shakespeare could have written his late plays that were staged there.

  The story dates back to February 1596, when James Burbage purchased a building in the fashionable London precinct of Blackfriars. Burbage’s lease on Shakespeare’s company’s outdoor playhouse in Shoreditch, the Theatre, was about to expire, and his plan was to transfer the company to a permanent playing space. The new site had a lot going for it. For one thing, it was located in the heart of the City, which was much more convenient for London playgoers. For another, it was indoors, so that players could perform in inclement weather, year-round. And because of the site’s ecclesiastical origins – it had been a Dominican priory before the dissolution of the monasteries – Blackfriars was technically not under the jurisdiction of London’s City fathers, which meant that professional actors, who at the time were relegated to London’s suburbs, could perform in the centre of town without fear of retribution. Burbage sank a lot of money into turning the building into an intimate playhouse, capable of holding perhaps six hundred spectators in a crammed rectangular playing chamber that was forty-six by sixty-six feet. But he failed to anticipate the stiff resistance to his plans by influential locals, including the company’s own patron, the Lord Chamberlain, who did not want a theatre in the neighbourhood that would attract unruly crowds. The rest of the story is familiar: in 1599 the company moved instead to Southwark and began playing in an outdoor playhouse built out of the timbers of the dismantled Theatre, which they named the Globe.

  Many years passed before the dream of inhabiting Blackfriars became a reality for Shakespeare and his fellow players. Soon after the Globe was up and running, hoping to recoup some of his late father’s enormous outlay, Richard Burbage leased the Blackfriars site to Henry Evans, an enterprising scrivener who had been working with various children’s companies since the 1580s and who wagered correctly that those living near the Blackfriars stage wouldn’t object to a children’s company performing there a few times a week. Evans now had a theatre but he didn’t have enough boy actors, so he brought in Nathaniel Giles, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal at Windsor, who had the legal authority to abduct potential ‘choristers’, much as sailors were impressed to man the English fleet. By late 1600 the children were thriving at Blackfriars and threatening the dominance of the adult players. Shakespeare was well aware, as he writes in Hamlet, that the ‘public audience’ are ‘turned to private plays, / And to the humour of children’.

  By 1604, however, following a terrible outbreak of plague that closed the theatres and swept away a sixth of London’s population, Evans became ‘weary and out of liking’ with his long-term lease and approached Richard Burbage about cancelling it, but they never came to terms. Evans must have been relieved, for his company’s fortunes soon improved after a patent was issued placing the company under the patronage of Anna of Denmark, James’s queen. Renamed the Children of the Queen’s Revels, the company soon attracted the most talented young dramatists of the day, including John Marston, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. The repertory of the adult companies tended to range over all genres, and included a lot of old crowdpleasers. The Children of the Queen’s Revels, lacking a backlist of old favourites to draw upon, stuck to a more restricted fare, mixing tragicomedies with irreverent satires. Its novel offerings catered to upscale playgoers willing to pay sixpence for the cheapest seat (six times the entry price charged at the Globe) and as high as two shillings and sixpence for those who wanted a box seat adjoining the stage. Gallants could pay more and sit on stools on the stage itself, to see and be seen, just a few feet from the action.

  The adult players kept a close eye on these developments. There was concern that the satiric bent of the dramatic fare at Blackfriars crossed the line and might land all of London’s players in trouble – a point made around 1608 by the veteran Thomas Heywood, who warned in his Apology for Actors of the new breed of writers who hurl ‘liberal invectives against all estates’, and do so in ‘the mouths of children, supposing their juniority to a be a privilege for any railing, be it never so violent’. It wasn’t long before a string of outrageous plays – including Eastward Ho, The Isle of Gulls and especially a lost play called The Silver Mine that mocked the King himself as a foul-mouthed drunk – angered James enough to call for the dissolution of the children’s company (the King had reportedly ‘vowed they should never play more, but should first beg their bread’). Henry Evans, now paying £40 a year rent but forbidden to stage any plays at Blackfriars, decided that it was time to move on, and surrendered his lease to the Burbages in August 1608.

  It’s at this point that Shakespeare and his fellow King’s Men reenter the picture, having tacitly secured the permission that had been denied them a dozen years earlier to perform in this space. Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, Thomas Evans, John Heminges and William Sly formed a syndicate and became housekeepers in the potentially lucrative indoor playhouse. They chose not to abandon the Globe, however, playing at Blackfriars from October until Easter and outdoors at the Globe during late spring and summer. The first few years of the new venture saw both challenges and setbacks. In contrast to the Globe venture nine years earlier, they were moving into an established playhouse with a regular and demanding clientele who brought certain expectations about the kind of drama they wanted to see. In addition, Blackfriars needed significant renovation. More troublingly, plague now returned with renewed force and it wasn’t until 1610 that the King’s Men began performing at Blackfriars on a regular basis.

  The King’s Men had motives for the move beyond finding a dry place to play in winter. The core of their veteran company was getting on in years and an infusion of fresh blood was badly needed. The attrition of late had been
severe. Thomas Pope, one of the founding members of the Chamberlain’s Men and a co-owner of the Globe, had died by 1604. We hear no more of Sinklo after that year, either. Shakespeare, we can be pretty sure, had stopped acting regularly for the company around this time as well. Augustine Phillips, another member of the original fraternity and a co-owner of the Globe, died in 1605. William Sly died in 1608 soon after signing on to the Blackfriars syndicate. The survivors were ageing, and the Jacobean theatre – no less for professional playwrights than for actors – was, they knew, a young man’s game. That the King’s Men were keen on absorbing some of the young talent on display at Blackfriars is confirmed in a lawsuit in which the Burbages acknowledged as much:

  In process of time, the boys growing up to be men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, and were taken to strengthen the service, the boys daily wearing out, it was considered that house would be as fit for ourselves, and so purchased the lease remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were Heminges, Condall, Shakespeare, etc.

  Richard Field, William Ostler and John Underwood were the pick of the litter – and having reached the age of twenty or so were ready to take on adult roles. All three would soon become sharers in the King’s Men (though it took the enterprising Field a few more years before his move became final). This was a full partnership, combining the next generation of star actors with some of London’s most beloved and established players. We can see the result in one of the few cast lists from the period to survive. Audiences lucky enough to watch the King’s Men perform John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi at Blackfriars saw the parts of Ferdinand, the Cardinal, Antonio and Delio performed by Burbage, Condell, Ostler and Underwood respectively. While no cast lists for individual Shakespeare plays survive, Underwood, Field and Ostler are listed in the 1623 Folio among those who acted in his plays.