A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  The armed men didn’t have far to go. Their destination was another playhouse in Shoreditch, the nearby Theatre. The Theatre, built in 1576, was London’s oldest and most celebrated playhouse, nursery of the great drama of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare. It was here, a few years earlier, that audiences heard “the Ghost who cried so miserably at the Theatre like an oyster-wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge!’” (not Shakespeare’s play, but an earlier, now lost Hamlet). As the men approached the hulking building the Theatre itself must have seemed a ghostly presence, vacant now for two years in the aftermath of a fallout between the Chamberlain’s Men and their prickly landlord, Giles Allen. Local residents, seeing the armed troupe approach, may well have been confused about what was happening during this week of holiday revels, for at the head of the group was the leading tragedian in England, the charismatic star of the Chamberlain’s Men, Richard Burbage. But this was no impromptu piece of street theater. Burbage, his older brother Cuthbert, and the rest of the men bearing weapons were there in deadly earnest, about to trespass and take back what they considered rightfully theirs, and, if necessary, come to blows with anyone trying to stop them.

  The Chamberlain’s Men were in trouble, and the only way out was to get in a bit deeper. Things had begun to go wrong two years earlier, when James Burbage (Richard and Cuthbert’s father and the man who built the Theatre) decided to build an indoor stage in the wealthy London neighborhood of Blackfriars. The venue would have enabled his son Richard and the other shareholders of the Chamberlain’s Men to act year-round for a more upscale and better-paying clientele, providing more security than they had at the Theatre, where the lease was expiring. James Burbage sank the considerable sum of six hundred pounds into the venture. As the Blackfriars Theatre neared completion, influential neighbors who were worried about the noise and riffraff the theater might attract, succeeded in having playing banned there. James Burbage died soon after, having also failed to renegotiate an extension on his lease at the Theatre. His sons Richard and Cuthbert had no better luck changing Giles Allen’s mind. With the Burbages’ capital tied up at Blackfriars and the Theatre now in Allen’s hands, the Chamberlain’s Men, lacking a permanent playing space, were in danger of becoming homeless.

  By early December, Richard Burbage had quietly approached five of his fellow actor-shareholders in the company—William Shakespeare, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, and Will Kemp—with a plan. The first thing they needed to do was find a new site for a theater, one that was accessible to London’s playgoers but outside the city limits (where playhouses weren’t subject to the authority of the often hostile city fathers). Members of the company, probably Heminges or Condell, who lived in the parish of St. Mary Aldermanbury, had learned that a neighbor, Sir Nicholas Brend, was looking to rent some land in Southwark. The property was a stone’s throw from the Rose Theatre, home of their main rivals, the Admiral’s Men. The Chamberlain’s Men quickly came to terms with Brend, securing an inexpensive thirty-one-year lease that was theirs from Christmas Day. The transaction was rushed, and it wasn’t until late February that the paperwork was completed.

  They now had a building site but as yet no theater. In the past, when they had provided a playhouse and covered the lease, the Burbages kept the lion’s share of the profits. No longer able to supply the company with a permanent home, Richard and Cuthbert Burbage made an unprecedented offer: they would secure the building materials for a new playhouse, worth roughly seven hundred pounds, if the five actor-shareholders would each cover ten percent of the remaining construction costs as well as the expenses of running the theater. The material would come from the dismantled Theatre, the pieces of its frame carefully marked and reassembled on Bankside. They’d still have to do it on the cheap: no tiles on the roof, as at the Theatre, just inexpensive (and flammable) thatch. In exchange, and for the first time in the history of the professional theater in London, actor-sharers would be part owners of the playhouse as well as partners in the company, the five men each receiving ten percent of the total profits. The potential yield on their investment would be great, over a hundred pounds a year. Still, that initial investment—roughly seventy pounds each—was considerable at a time when a freelance dramatist earned just six pounds a play and a day laborer ten pounds a year. The risks were also great. Few had that kind of cash on hand, which meant taking out loans at steep interest rates (the Burbages later complained that it took them years to pay off what they borrowed to cover their share). Plague could once again close the public theaters for an extended period. Fire could destroy the playhouse (as it would in 1613, when the Globe’s thatch caught fire). Or the Privy Council could finally act on one of its periodic threats and close the theaters.

  What made the risky plan plausible was that Richard and Cuthbert Burbage knew that their father had been savvy enough to put a clause in the original lease stating that while Giles Allen owned the land, Burbage owned the theater he built on it. But since the lease had expired, a strong case could be made that the building was no longer theirs. It was a commonplace, which Shakespeare himself had recently repeated in The Merry Wives of Windsor, that you’re likely to lose your “edifice” when you build “a fair house… on another man’s ground” (2.2.207–8). Allen, litigious, well connected, and brother of a former lord mayor, was not a man to be trifled with. But what alternative was there?

  The Chamberlain’s Men didn’t have much time. They knew that Allen was away for the Christmas holidays at his country home in Essex. They had also heard that Allen was preparing to dismantle the building and keep its valuable timber for himself. If that happened, they’d be ruined. They certainly had to act before word of their new lease got out. They had performed before Queen Elizabeth at Whitehall Palace on December 26 (the day after their new lease went into effect) and were expected again at court on New Year’s Day. Assuming that the job would probably take more than a day, they were left with a very narrow window. The snow and cold were unfortunate, and would make the work misery for the carpenters handling the frozen timber, but that couldn’t be helped.

  When the armed group arrived at the playhouse, they set to work immediately. Even with an early start there wouldn’t be much daylight; the sun had risen that morning after eight and would set before four in the afternoon. It was four days shy of a full moon, but with the snow coming down there was little prospect of working by moonlight. According to evidence submitted in the heated legal battle that followed, their appearance quickly drew a crowd—friends and tenants of Allen as well as supporters of the Chamberlain’s Men, including Ellen Burbage, James’s feisty widow. And we can be pretty sure that the other shareholders whose livelihoods were at stake—Shakespeare, Phillips, Heminges, Kemp, and Pope—were at the scene as well, among the unnamed “diverse other persons” accompanying the Burbages.

  Outmanned, a couple of Giles Allen’s friends, one with power of attorney, tried to stop the trespassers, to no avail. A silk weaver named Henry Johnson demanded that they stop dismantling the playhouse, but was put off by Peter Street, the master builder who had been brought in to supervise the job. Street explained that he was only taking the pegged vertical posts and horizontal groundsills apart in order to put them together again “in another form” on the same site. Johnson, who was privy to the failed negotiations over the lease, probably knew better, but he backed off. By the time they were done, the workers had made a mess of the place, causing forty shillings’ worth of damage.

  Of all those gathered at the Theatre that day, none stood to gain or lose as much as Shakespeare. Had the escapade failed, had Allen been forewarned or had he succeeded in his subsequent court battle against the seizure, Shakespeare’s alternatives would have been limited. It’s hard to see how the Chamberlain’s Men could have survived for long as an ensemble without a permanent playhouse—and their arrangement at the aging Curtain was only temporary. The only other available venue was the Swan Theatre, built in 1595 in Paris Garden on the Bankside. But the a
uthorities had prohibited permanent playing there after 1597, following the staging of a scandalous play, The Isle of Dogs. Of course, Shakespeare could have continued writing plays as a freelancer, as others did, but the pay was modest. At best, he might have offered some plays as capital and joined his competitors, the Admiral’s Men, as shareholder and chief dramatist, if they would have him on those terms.

  But Shakespeare understood that more was at stake in rescuing those old oak posts than his livelihood as a playwright. He was not simply England’s most experienced living dramatist, author of (or collaborator on) roughly eighteen plays, including such favorites as Richard the Third, Romeo and Juliet, and The First Part of Henry the Fourth; he also wrote for and acted alongside its most talented ensemble of players. The Chamberlain’s Men had been together for five years, having emerged out of the remnants of broken and reconfigured companies, its players drawn from among the best of those who had recently performed with Sussex’s, Derby’s, Pembroke’s, Strange’s, and the Queen’s Men. Shakespeare himself had probably been affiliated with Pembroke’s, or Strange’s, perhaps both. Companies in the early 1590s formed, merged, and dissolved so rapidly, with plays migrating from one group of players to the next, that it is impossible to track Shakespeare’s affiliations at this time with more confidence. There were considerable advantages to a company’s longevity. Since its formation in 1594 it’s likely that the Chamberlain’s Men had already collaborated on close to a hundred plays, almost a fifth of them Shakespeare’s. When Shakespeare sat down to write a play, it was with the capabilities of this accomplished group in mind. Hamlet would not have been the same if Shakespeare had not written the title role for Richard Burbage. Comic roles were scripted for Will Kemp’s improvisational clowning. Augustine Phillips and George Bryan had been acting professionally for over a decade; Thomas Pope, who excelled at comic roles, even longer. Henry Condell, Will Sly, John Duke, John Holland, and Christopher Beeston were also veteran performers and helped round out this all-star cast. The degree of trust and of mutual understanding (all the more important in a company that dispensed with a director) was extraordinary. For a dramatist—let alone a fellow player, as Shakespeare was—the breakup of such a group would have been an incalculable loss.

  As darkness fell on December 28, the old frame of the Theatre, loaded onto wagons, with horses slipping and straining from the burden of hauling the long half-ton, foot-square oak posts, began to make its way south through streets carpeted with snow. The wagons headed through Bishopsgate and southwest to Peter Street’s waterfront warehouse near Bridewell Stairs, where the timber was unloaded and safely stacked and stored. The popular story of the dismantled frame being drawn across or over the Thames (which was “nigh frozen over”) to the future building site is a fantasy: it would have been too risky sledding the heavy load across thin ice, and the steep tolls on London Bridge for wheelage and poundage would have been prohibitive. And had the timber been left exposed to the elements through the winter months at the marshy site of the Globe, it could have been warped beyond repair (if not subject to a counterraid by Giles Allen’s friends). Not until the foundations were ready would the frame of the Theatre be ferried across the Thames to Southwark, where by late summer, phoenix-like, it would be resurrected as the Globe.

  ON THE EVE OF THE DISMANTLING OF THE THEATRE, SHAKESPEARE STOOD at a professional crossroads. It had been five years since he had last found himself in such a situation. At that time he was torn between pursuing a career in the theater and one in which he sought advancement by securing aristocratic patronage through his published poetry. For a while he had done both, but the rewards of patronage (he had fulsomely dedicated two published poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, to the young and charismatic Earl of Southampton) either didn’t materialize or proved unsatisfying. Theater won out, though Shakespeare kept writing sonnets, which he didn’t care to publish but shared with his friends. After joining the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594, Shakespeare hit his stride in the next two years with a great burst of innovative plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, King John, Richard the Second, The Merchant of Venice, and The First Part of Henry the Fourth.

  But by the end of 1596, following one of his most successful efforts, The First Part of Henry the Fourth, this creative surge diminished and his range contracted. Over the next two years he seems to have only written three plays: a second part to Henry the Fourth and two comedies, The Merry Wives of Windsor and the witty Much Ado About Nothing. Will Kemp figured prominently in these plays as Falstaff in the two parts of Henry the Fourth and Merry Wives, and then as the bumbling constable Dogberry in Much Ado. These were popular plays and Kemp a crowd-pleaser. But Shakespeare was aware that he had nearly exhausted the rich veins of romantic comedy and English history. He was restless, unsatisfied with the profitably formulaic and with styles of writing that came too easily to him, but hadn’t yet figured out what new directions to take. And that depended on more than inspiration or will. Unlike his sonnet writing, his playwriting was constrained by the needs of his fellow players as well as the expectations of audiences both at the public playhouse and at court—demands that often pulled him in opposite directions.

  Shakespeare was not alone in experiencing something of a creative hiatus at this time (if three fine plays in two years can be considered a falling-off). This was not the most auspicious moment in the history of the Elizabethan stage. One could point to the relative dearth of exceptional dramatists, the pressure by authorities to curb playgoing, and the periodic closing of the theaters because of plague. During these years England also suffered terrible harvests and renewed threats of invasion from Spain. By 1597, a generation of groundbreaking playwrights—including John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, and Robert Greene—had passed from the scene, and members of a younger generation (whose ranks included Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood) were only beginning to find their voices. In the course of a few short years Shakespeare had gone from “upstart crow” (Robert Greene’s jealous and belittling label) to grizzled veteran, and was virtually alone in straddling these two generations of playwrights. As an artist who thrived on rivalry and whose work is characterized by an unequaled capacity to absorb the styles and techniques of his fellow writers, Shakespeare seems to have needed competition to push him to the next level, and in 1597 and 1598 there wasn’t enough of it.

  The scarcity of recently staged plays in London’s bookstalls was further evidence that 1597 and 1598 were relatively lean years. Yet Londoners’ craving for theater had never been greater. In addition to the Chamberlain’s Men at the Curtain and the Admiral’s Men at the Rose, there were a score of itinerant companies touring through the English countryside, some no doubt performing in London while passing through town, either at inns or at the Swan. By 1600, in response to popular demand, entrepreneurs had rushed to build permanent new theaters around the city, including the Globe, the Fortune, and the Boar’s Head Inn, while resident children’s companies began playing at St. Paul’s and Blackfriars. In 1600, in an England of four million, London and its immediate environs held a population of roughly two hundred thousand. If, on any given day, two plays were staged in playhouses that held as many as two to three thousand spectators each, it’s likely that with theaters even half full, as many as three thousand or so Londoners were attending a play. Over the course of a week—conservatively assuming five days of performances each week—fifteen thousand Londoners paid to see a play. Obviously, some never went at all, or rarely, while others—including young and generally well-to-do law students at the Inns of Court—made up for that, seeing dozens of plays a year. But on the average, it’s likely that over a third of London’s adult population saw a play every month.

  Which meant that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were writing for the most experienced playgoers in history. Unlike modern theaters, in which actors perform the same play for weeks, months, even years, in Elizabethan playhouses the p
lay changed daily, with resident companies introducing as many as a score of new plays annually and supplementing them with revivals of old favorites. Unsuccessful plays disappeared from the repertory after only a handful of performances. Shakespeare could count on an unusually discriminating audience, one sensitive to subtle transformations of popular genres like romantic comedy and revenge tragedy. But the pressure that he and his fellow playwrights were under to churn out one innovative and entertaining play after another must have proven exhausting.

  It’s no surprise then that playwriting at the close of the sixteenth century was a young man’s game. None of the men who wrote plays for a living in 1599 were over forty years old. They had come from London and the countryside, from the Inns of Court, the universities, and various trades. About the only thing these writers had in common was that they were all from the middling classes. There were about fifteen of them at work in 1599, and they knew one another and one another’s writing styles well: George Chapman, Henry Chettle, John Day, Thomas Dekker, Michael Drayton, Richard Hathaway, William Haughton, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Anthony Munday, Henry Porter, Robert Wilson, and of course Shakespeare. Collectively this year they wrote about sixty plays, of which only a dozen or so survive, a quarter of these Shakespeare’s. Their names—though not Shakespeare’s—can be found in the pages of an extraordinary volume called Henslowe’s Diary, a ledger or account book belonging to Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose Theatre, in which he recorded his business activities, mostly theatrical, from 1592 to 1609. The Diary is a mine of information. Henslowe’s entries tell us the titles of lost plays, what playwrights were paid, and who collaborated with whom. Other entries list gate receipts, expenditures for costumes and props, and in some instances on which days particular plays were performed.