A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  About half of all plays this year were coauthored, with two, three, or more playwrights writing collaboratively, each handling the parts or scenes at which he excelled. Shakespeare coauthored several plays near the outset and end of his career, but in 1599 he wrote alone. While other playwrights had both their mornings and afternoons free to write and engage in collaborative ventures, Shakespeare’s at this time were spent fulfilling his company obligations—rehearsing and performing alongside his fellow sharers, hired men, and apprenticed boy actors. The only other dramatist in his situation was Thomas Heywood, who was currently under contract to act for the Admiral’s Men (though he wrote for a number of companies). In a career otherwise rich in collaboration, this year Heywood also wrote alone.

  A closer look at Henslowe’s Diary also suggests that some writing teams left the services of the Admiral’s Men for extended stretches and wrote for another company, almost certainly the Chamberlain’s Men. For example, three of the Admiral’s Men’s regulars—Anthony Munday, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathaway—mysteriously drop from Henslowe’s payroll in August 1598. And they were joined by Michael Drayton in the early winter of 1599. Not until the autumn of 1599 would they all suddenly return to the Admiral’s Men with a play called Sir John Oldcastle—a provocative send-up of Shakespeare’s controversial portrait of the Lollard martyr in his two-part Henry the Fourth. While records don’t survive of who provided most of the twenty or so new plays that Shakespeare’s company staged this year, it’s likely that writers who were off Henslowe’s payroll for extended periods were responsible for such Chamberlain’s Men’s offerings as Owen Tudor and Henry Richmond and perhaps A Larum for London and Thomas Lord Cromwell as well. By autumn 1599, with the establishment of new playing companies at the Boar’s Head Inn, Paul’s, and Blackfriars, it increasingly became a seller’s market: as opportunities for these freelance dramatists expanded, even more of them were drawn to writing for more than a single company.

  Given the intimate working relationships between playwrights (and between playwrights and players), personality clashes were inevitable. It didn’t help matters that many Elizabethan actors were skilled fencers. Just the previous September, Ben Jonson had quarreled with Gabriel Spencer, a rising star (and shareholder) in the Admiral’s Men, and in the ensuing duel near the Curtain killed him. Jonson, who was briefly imprisoned, only escaped hanging by reading his “neck verse”—a legal loophole dating from medieval times whereby the literate were spared the gallows by reading from the Bible in Latin, a task easy enough for the classically trained Jonson. But he did not escape unscathed: Jonson was branded with a “T” for Tyburn, Elizabethan London’s site of execution, on his thumb. The next time he committed a felony he would hang there. Spencer was no stranger to violence, having two years earlier stabbed to death James Feake, who had come at him with a candlestick. His fatal encounter with Jonson took place the very month when Jonson’s first play for the Chamberlain’s Men—Every Man in His Humour—was performed at the Curtain. Ironically, at the time of their quarrel Spencer was probably learning his part in Jonson’s collaborative (and, in retrospect, ironically titled) play for the Admiral’s Men, Hot Anger Soon Cold. And in June 1599, Henry Porter came to blows with fellow playwright John Day in Southwark. Day drew his rapier and killed Porter. The cause of their fight is also unknown; jurors found Day guilty of manslaughter, not murder. Day was subsequently pardoned and resumed writing for the Admiral’s Men, mostly in collaboration with Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, who either accepted Day’s version of the fight or put professional needs above loyalty to a former writing partner. Ben Jonson, who had also worked with Porter, was less forgiving, and classed Day among the “rogues” and “base fellows.”

  London’s civic leaders didn’t share the popular enthusiasm for the rough-and-tumble world of theater. Their view of things is offered in a petition submitted to the Privy Council in the summer of 1597 requesting that London’s playhouses be closed. What was staged there, they argued, was immoral (“containing nothing but profane fables, lascivious matters, cozening devices, and scurrilous behaviors”) and the audience itself a collection of misfits (“vagrant persons, masterless men, thieves, horse stealers, whore-mongerers, cozeners, coney-catchers, contrivers of treason, and other idle and dangerous persons”). But the city fathers could do little about it, since the playing companies were patronized by influential aristocrats, including members of the Privy Council (after the queen, the most powerful political body in the realm). It must have come as something of a shock to the resident acting companies to learn at this time that the Privy Council decided to act against them, ordering “that not only no plays shall be used within London or about the City or in any public place during this time of summer, but that also those playhouses that are erected and built only for such purposes shall be plucked down.” If the order had been carried out, it might have meant the end of the Elizabethan public theater. The likeliest explanation—and one believed by the players themselves—is that this harsh response was prompted by the scandal created by The Isle of Dogs. By early October those imprisoned for their role in that play were released and the playing companies allowed to resume regular playing (except at the Swan). But the episode unnerved the playing companies, reminding them how vulnerable their situation was in London and how easily their expensive theaters could be knocked down (the Privy Council was quite explicit about the demolition order, specifying that those responsible for tearing down the theaters “deface the same as they may not be employed again to such use”). The Isle of Dogs affair gives a sharp sense of the heightened sensitivity to how political topics were staged.

  For Shakespeare and his fellow Chamberlain’s Men, 1597 to 1598 was not the best of times. In addition to their troubles at the Theatre and Blackfriars, they endured the deaths of James Burbage and of their patron Henry Carey, the lord chamberlain (whose son, George Carey, succeeded him as their patron, and later as lord chamberlain as well). They also lost the services of two leading players, the veteran performer and sharer George Bryan (acknowledged in the First Folio as one of the “principal actors” in Shakespeare’s plays) and Samuel Cross (whose talents were still affectionately recalled over a decade later). The rough stretch had begun a year earlier, in the summer of 1596, when an outbreak of plague briefly closed the theaters. To earn money, Shakespeare and his fellow actors abandoned London and took to the road, touring through southwest England and playing before provincial audiences, with recorded stops in Faversham, Dover, and Bath. For Shakespeare himself, this period would bring terrible news.

  It was either while on the road or immediately upon his return from the tour that took the company to Faversham in August 1596 that word reached Shakespeare of the death of his only son, Hamnet, who was buried in Stratford-upon-Avon on August 11. It could not have been easy for Anne Shakespeare to contact her itinerant husband to convey the news of Hamnet’s illness and death—it would have taken a messenger from Stratford four or five days at least just to find Shakespeare—so it’s unlikely that he learned of his son’s demise in time to return home for his funeral. Unlike Ben Jonson, who left such a touching poem on the death of his young son and namesake Benjamin, Shakespeare left no testimonial for Hamnet. But then, unlike Jonson, Shakespeare lived at a great distance from his family, returning home infrequently. Hamnet and his twin sister, Judith, had been baptized on February 2, 1585, born two years after their elder sister Susanna. By the end of the 1580s, Shakespeare left his wife and three young children behind in Stratford to seek his fortune in London. Shakespeare may have barely known his son, but that is not to say he did not feel his loss deeply. It may even have accounted for his diminished output in the year or so that followed. We just don’t know.

  THE INVITATION TO BECOME PART OWNER OF A NEW THEATER ON THE Bankside came at a critical moment in Shakespeare’s career. And the venture would play a major role in the redirection of his art. The Globe offered Shakespeare a fresh start, the possibility of writing for a n
ew set of playgoers with as yet unhardened expectations, unlike those who had been frequenting the Theatre and Curtain for so many years. Since at least 1596—when James Burbage tried and failed to move the company to a theater that catered to a more privileged audience—the sharers of the Chamberlain’s Men were divided over what kind of audience they wanted to attract. Some, like the comic star Will Kemp, were deeply invested in the traditions of popular entertainment of the theaters of the northern suburbs. For other sharers, and their ranks included Shakespeare, who was most constrained by these conventions, the move to the Globe reopened the possibility of dispensing with a dependence on improvisational clowning and raucous jigs that playgoers at the Curtain and Theatre had come to love and expect. With a move to the Globe now imminent, suppressed differences over these issues resurfaced.

  The Chamberlain’s Men depended upon the thousands of Londoners willing to pay a penny or more, day in, day out, to see them perform. For that reason, every play they staged was written with a popular audience in mind and premiered in the public theaters. But the company’s long-term political security depended on patronage at court. Fortunately for London’s actors and playwrights, the queen and her court enjoyed seeing plays. But Elizabeth didn’t want to pay to keep a retinue of actors for a half-dozen or so command performances a year. She found it easier and much less expensive to reward the players with a gift of ten pounds each time they played at court (though her courtiers patronized the playhouses, Elizabeth herself never set foot in the public theaters). The fiction—which also happened to be the official position of the Privy Council—was that public performances were essentially dress rehearsals whereby the leading companies “might be the better enabled and prepared to show such plays before her Majesty as they shall be required at times meet and accustomed, to which end they have been chiefly licensed and tolerated.”

  Shakespeare had had unparalleled success in pleasing both courtly and popular audiences over the past few years—but these admirers weren’t necessarily drawn to the same things in his plays. Ordinary Londoners flocked to The First Part of Henry the Fourth for its “humorous conceits.” The play continued to pack the theater: “let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest,” wrote Leonard Digges, and “you scarce shall have a room, / All is so pestered.” Courtly audiences, in contrast, were more caught up in the same play’s flirtation with topical political concerns (which explains why the lord chamberlain asked Shakespeare and his fellow players to perform it when he had to entertain the Flemish ambassador).

  Of late, Shakespeare and his fellow players had been invited to play at court far more than all other companies combined, fifteen times in the past three years (and his company also gave private performances for aristocrats, both in London or on tour at their great houses in the country). They were keenly aware of how important the support of the queen, the Privy Council, and the lord chamberlain were—all the more so given the uncertainty about how much longer Elizabeth would reign. They had to prepare against the possibility that only a single company might be protected under a future monarch or singled out for special status as the next “Queen’s” or more likely “King’s” Men.

  Just because Shakespeare was able to write plays that appealed to audiences across a wide social spectrum didn’t mean that he wasn’t frustrated by the limits this imposed on what he could write. As his understanding of drama continued to deepen, his desire to experiment—to push the bounds of comedy and tragedy; to wrestle with increasingly complicated social, historical, and political issues; to render how inner states of experience could be conveyed; even to coin new words when English fell short of what his imagination conjured—jarred with the demands of writing plays that had to please all. Those intricate, brilliant sonnets he kept writing provided an outlet, certainly, but that wasn’t enough. Here, too, the move to the Globe, whose identity was as yet unfixed, offered a way forward.

  The different responses of citizens and courtiers to his work were part of a larger problem Shakespeare faced having to do with how he was seen as an artist. Though he had written an early Roman tragedy, eight pathbreaking English histories, and some of the best comedies that the English stage had ever seen, it was only in the past year or so that contemporary critics had finally begun to acknowledge his talent, and even more frustrating that when they did so it was invariably his more sexually charged work—the two long poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, his love tragedy Romeo and Juliet, and those sonnets that only a privileged few had read or heard—that won their praise. In 1598, for example, the poet Richard Barnfield celebrated Shakespeare’s “honey-flowing vein” in Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. John Weever likewise calls him “honey-tongued Shakespeare” in a poetic tribute that year, where “fire-hot Venus” and “rose-cheeked Adonis” once again come in for special praise. Weever wanted to compliment the plays but was stumped when it came to their names: “Romeo, Richard; more whose names I know not.” Shakespeare would not have been flattered.

  The most striking praise for Shakespeare at this time appears in Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury, also published in 1598. No contemporary writer comes off more favorably in Meres’s book than Shakespeare, though once again it’s Shakespeare the honey-tongued love poet who commands attention: “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare,” Meres writes, “witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, etc.” Meres predictably includes Shakespeare among “the most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love.” Shakespeare must have been relieved to see this caricature balanced by attention to his plays, for Meres also writes that as “Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his [Comedy of ] Errors, his Love Labor’s Lost, his Love Labor’s Won, his Midsummer’s Night Dream, and his Merchant of Venice. For tragedy, his Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Henry the Fourth, King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.” But only seven of Shakespeare’s plays had been published before 1598, and it wasn’t until that year that his name even appeared on a title page of a play.

  The English Ovid—the poet of the “heart-robbing line,” as an anonymous contemporary put it a couple of years later—was a hard reputation to shake. The same anonymous writer even took Shakespeare to task for steering clear of more serious subject matter: “Could but a graver subject him content / Without love’s foolish lazy languishment.” We know too little about the reading and book-buying habits of Elizabethans, but what evidence we have confirms that, especially for younger readers, it was Shakespeare’s amorous writing that held the greatest appeal. When, for example, the twenty-one-year-old Scottish poet William Drummond arrived in London in 1606, he kept a list of the titles of books he read. Drummond passed over Shakespeare’s histories and major tragedies in his first year in London in favor of Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lucrece, and The Passionate Pilgrim. He may have already read Venus and Adonis, for it appears in a separate list of books he owned.

  Shakespeare knew that his plays were valued differently at court, where he was recognized as a dramatist alert to the factional world of contemporary politics. Along with Richard the Second (whose deposition scene was never printed during Elizabeth’s lifetime), The First Part of Henry the Fourth had probably done the most to earn him this reputation and had even provoked an angry response from the new lord chamberlain, William Brooke, Lord Cobham, who briefly succeeded Shakespeare’s company’s patron, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, in that office. Shakespeare had portrayed Cobham’s namesake, an earlier Lord Cobham named Sir John Oldcastle, as a riotous glutton—a portrait sharply at odds with Oldcastle’s reputation as one of England’s great proto-Protestant martyrs. It’s hard from this distance to determine whether the initial slight was intentional on Shakespeare’s part, an attempt to poke fun at a Puritan hero
like Oldcastle or a sly dig that aligned Shakespeare with court factions opposed to Cobham and his son. It may simply have been that the prickly new lord chamberlain was chagrined that Shakespeare’s play about Oldcastle was performed at court under his direct supervision, and the offense was taken only at that time. The long and the short of it is that Shakespeare was ordered to change the name, and he did, turning Oldcastle to Falstaff.

  The antagonism did not stop there, however, suggesting that the slight wasn’t accidental. If Shakespeare had unknowingly stumbled and insulted the Cobhams the first time around, he probably did so deliberately in his next play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, which he interrupted The Second Part of Henry the Fourth to write. This time, while careful to call the hero Falstaff and not Oldcastle, Shakespeare gave the name “Brook” to the disguised, jealous, and much mocked husband in the play. The family name of the Lord Cobhams was Brooke, and there could be no mistaking the insult—which the master of the revels, Edmund Tilney, who gave his stamp of approval to the play, must have winked at. And Shakespeare also included a gently mocking allusion in Merry Wives to an actual German duke (named Mompelgard) who had been hovering around the English court waiting to be admitted to England’s Order of the Garter.