A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  Between the acting of a dreadful thing

  And the first motion, all the interim is

  Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.

  The genius and the mortal instruments

  Are then in council; and the state of man,

  Like to a little kingdom, suffers then

  The nature of an insurrection.

  (2.1.63–69)

  Read one way, it’s a portrait of a brooding intelligence struggling to understand itself. Read another, it’s a justification of tyrannicide even as it recognizes that a mind desperate to commit itself to action resembles nothing so much as insurrection itself. From this point on, even when he is most stoic and cheerful in his resolve, we can never forget the ghosts that haunt Brutus. Read a third way, it’s about Shakespeare’s craft, what happens between conception and execution, the transformation of the workings of his mind into the staging or “acting of a dreadful thing.” It’s not too much of a stretch to claim that Macbeth was born at this moment, its plot stored away for a few years in the recesses of Shakespeare’s imagination: “My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, / Shakes so my single state of man, / That function is smothered in surmise, / And nothing is but what is not” (1.3.140–43). And, for many at the Globe that spring and summer, the final lines of Brutus’s speech also brought to mind a different interim as they anxiously waited for a resolution to the insurrection their state was experiencing in that “little kingdom” Ireland.

  Shakespeare was also discovering that what characters didn’t say mattered, too. He had curbed the tendency to excess on display in Henry the Fifth, whose long speeches are more stirring than revealing. In Julius Caesar the most memorable speeches are also the shortest: Caesar’s “Et tu Brute” and Brutus’s “Portia is dead” each sum up a character and a world.

  AROUND MID-MAY, FIFTEEN HUNDRED COPIES OF THE NEW EDITION OF Hayward’s History were printed and readied for sale at Wolfe’s bookshop in Pope’s Head Alley near the Royal Exchange. The Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, responsible along with the Archbishop of Canterbury for censoring printed works, had had enough. After Whitsunday, on May 27, Bancroft ordered the second print run seized by the wardens of the Stationers and delivered to his house in Fulham, where he burned the lot of them. Though done quietly, everyone, including those clamoring for a copy of the sold-out book, soon learned what had happened. Wolfe could curse the loss of his investment, but he had no recourse. From now on, there would only be one book for sale about Henry IV in London’s bookstalls, Shakespeare’s.

  Hayward’s History turned out to be kindling for a much larger conflagration. A week later, on June 1, John Whitgift and Bancroft ordered that more than a dozen other titles be confiscated and burned. The list included, first and foremost, the works of satirists: Joseph Hall’s Biting Satires and Virgidemiarum, John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image and The Scourge of Villainy, Everard Giulpin’s Skialetheia, Thomas Middleton’s Micro-cynicon: Six Snarling Satires, Thomas Cutwode’s Caltha Poetarum, and John Davies’s Epigrams, which was bound with the Elegies of Christopher Marlowe, were all destroyed. Thomas Nashe’s and Gabriel Harvey’s works were singled out for special attention: “None of their books be ever printed hereafter.” Even two antifeminist works that could be read as critical of the unmarried Elizabeth—The Book Against Women and The Fifteen Joys of Marriage—were tossed into the flames.

  The Bishops’ Ban made clear that the vogue for topical satire was officially over: “No satires or epigrams” were to “be printed hereafter.” Hayward had also poisoned the well for those writing national history: “no English histories” are to “be printed except they be allowed by some of her Majesty’s Privy Council.” For the time being, then, only political and not ecclesiastical authorities could approve the publication of histories; an author of an even mildly critical history would have to be unusually bold to approach the councillors for permission to publish. Not even London’s dramatists escaped the ban, which also decreed that “no plays [were to] be printed except they be allowed by such as have authority.” Left unexplained was exactly why some works were called in and others spared. The ambiguity, perhaps deliberate, had a chilling effect. Looking over the seemingly arbitrary list of prescribed books, English men and women, some of whom were forced to abandon works in progress, must have been left wondering whether it was topical satire itself or rather the drift by some satirists toward the obscene or the explicitly political, that had provoked the bishops.

  Shakespeare hadn’t had any of his works banned, but even he was singed by the flames. Neither the popular Richard the Second nor The First Part of Henry the Fourth were published again during Elizabeth’s lifetime. The Chamberlain’s Men took extra precautions with his two other works on the hypersensitive Lancastrian reign: both The Second Part of Henry the Fourth and Henry the Fifth were sanitized and seen into print far more quickly than any other plays Shakespeare wrote before or after. Both plays had unfortunately painted an Archbishop of Canterbury in a particularly unfavorable light, especially The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, which when published eliminated such potentially offensive lines as “the Bishop / Turns insurrection to religion” (1.1.200–1). With the opening of the Globe, this was not a time to take unnecessary risks. The publishing history of Shakespeare’s plays at this time suggests that it was wiser for the Chamberlain’s Men to publish lightly sanitized versions and pull offending plays from the repertory, rather than let linger the memory of what might otherwise be regarded as seditious history.

  – 8 –

  Is This a Holiday?

  Since the end of the seventeenth century, critics and editors of Julius Caesar have focused almost exclusively on the play’s unforgettable characters and gripping political drama. From their perspective, the religious bits that surface throughout the play were “palpable blunders” and for a long time they did their best to ignore or repair them. When, in 1693, Thomas Rymer condemned the play’s anachronisms as “a sacrilege,” his language ironically registers the extent to which a fixed notion of what Shakespeare’s Roman play ought to be—classical, political, and pagan—had displaced the mix of religion and politics that Shakespeare’s audience would have taken for granted. Issues Elizabethans confronted in their world and in the theater—assassination, succession, tyrannicide, holidays—were not only steeped in but produced by religious division. Part of Shakespeare’s genius was discovering in Plutarch’s old story the fault lines of his own milieu.

  From the time of Henry VIII’s break from Rome, changes in state religion invited new, sometimes radical, political thought. With every twist and turn in the Tudor dynasty—with its various Acts of Supremacy, Submission, and Uniformity and its official shifts from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic to Protestant once again in little more than a quarter century—the effort to reconcile political and religious authority grew increasingly strained. Pope Pius V’s bull of 1570 excommunicating Elizabeth and absolving her subjects from allegiance to her only made things worse for English Catholics torn between loyalty to their church and to their country. If you accepted Rome’s verdict—though only the most radical Catholic fringe in England went this far—you could, in good conscience, support the assassination of Elizabeth as a tyrant.

  Once it was clear that Elizabeth was not going to marry or bear children, her advisers were worried enough about the possibility of Catholic succession to fall back upon quasi-republican positions to ensure Protestant rule. Elizabeth had to be offended by what their argument implied: that the people and not just their monarch had a say in such matters. You can see the effects of such arguments in works like Thomas Wilson’s unpublished manuscript on “The State of England,” written in 1600, where Wilson writes that an English monarch had “no authority to make laws nor to dispose of the crown; that must be done by general consent of all in Parliament. Yea, the king’s eldest son, though the kingdom be hereditary, shall not be crowned without the consent of the Parliament after the death of h
is father.” Though his manuscript was never intended for print, Wilson could not bring himself to come out and say that it was her subjects, not Elizabeth herself, who would confirm her successor. Peter Wentworth recently had, in his Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for Establishing Her Successor to the Crown. For his bluntness, Wentworth, a member of Parliament, died imprisoned in the Tower of London, and his tract, posthumously published in Scotland in 1598, was ordered by the Elizabethan authorities to be burned by the hangman.

  The authorities did their best to suppress talk of succession. Even a tourist like Thomas Platter quickly learned not to ask twice after being told that “it was forbidden on pain of death to make enquiries as to who is to succeed her on her decease, for fear that if it were known, this person in his lust for government might plot against the Queen’s life.” But because Elizabeth refused to name a successor, speculation was rife. Political tracts advocating rival contenders were published overseas and in Scotland. In England, their publication or sale was illegal.

  In the waning years of the reign, loyal Englishmen like Thomas Wilson were quietly handicapping the prospects of each of the dozen or so leading contenders for Elizabeth’s crown. Moreover, Elizabeth must have suspected that some of her privy councillors—including Essex and Cecil—were in secret correspondence with the King of Scots if not others as well, each doing his best to ingratiate himself with her likeliest successor. Gossip was rampant. Those eager for a Catholic monarch to ascend the English throne still lived in hope, abetted by the prophecy circulating in Spain that Elizabeth would not outlive the year.

  Thomas Fitzherbert, an English Catholic living in Spain, wrote to a friend in early March of 1599 that while many believed that “the King of Scots will win the game if the Earl of Essex be not in his way,” he himself remained skeptical: “I think they are deceived, and that the other takes him for his competitor—which will be well for the Infanta”—that is, the leading Catholic claimant. He adds that with Essex and James both itching to succeed Elizabeth, the Spanish Infanta at least has an outside chance: “When two dogs fight for a bone, you know what follows?”

  It’s risky, then, to read history backward and assume that contemporaries viewed the King of Scots’s path to the throne as unobstructed. And his position was further undermined by rumormongers who questioned the depth of his commitment to Protestantism. Word spread in late April 1599 that the King of Scots “intends to gather grapes before they are ripe” and that “for a kingdom he will become a counterfeit Catholic.” William Camden writes of “certain lewd fellows there were, I know not out of what shop, to whom it was good as a reward to disturb the quiet peace. These men, to the end to break off by secret and wicked practices the amity betwixt the Queen and the King of Scots, spread rumors abroad that he inclined to the Papist’s faction, and was of a most averse mind to the Queen.”

  If this were not enough, Camden adds, a man named Valentine Thomas appeared on the scene, “accusing the King of Scots of ill affection towards the Queen.” This claim was taken more seriously. On August 4, 1598, Sir William Knollys wrote to the absent Essex that he had missed out on a “great debate” among the privy councillors “whether Valentine Thomas should be arraigned or no. It was concluded he should; but I think it is at a stand, the King of Scotland having desired that some for him might be at his arraignment.” In the end, Elizabeth overruled her councillors: “The matter she commanded to be concealed in silence, and thought not good to have the man put to death, less any aspersion should be laid upon the King’s reputation.” You couldn’t kill Thomas or people would mutter that he knew too much; but you had to put him to silence, lest he do more damage. And so he was left to rot in the Tower of London.

  A much more dangerous threat came from Catholic assassins—for the likeliest way to assure Catholic succession was to kill Elizabeth, triggering an uprising of English Catholics, supported by a Spanish invasion that would restore Catholic rule to England. If anything, the defeat of the armada in 1588 had intensified Spanish efforts to effect regime change by other means, and the closing years of the century saw some of the most notorious of such attempts on Elizabeth’s life. The King of Scots, as a likely Protestant successor, was also a target. John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton in mid-January 1599 that there “was a plot laid by certain Jesuits and priests to murder or poison the Scottish king, as it is confessed by some that are taken.” In such a climate, it wasn’t easy, nor could it have made much sense, to distinguish political from religious motivation.

  For Shakespeare in particular, political assassination wasn’t some costume drama that took place long ago and far away (and it is to his Macbeth that we owe the introduction of the word “assassination” into English literature). When he was nineteen years old, still living in Stratford a few months after the birth of his first child, Shakespeare learned that his relative John Somerville, a Catholic, had been implicated in a failed attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. The Oxford-educated Somerville, just a few years older than Shakespeare, was married to Margaret, the daughter of Edward and Mary Arden of Park Hall (how closely they were related to the Ardens from whom Shakespeare’s mother descended is unclear—and may even have been unclear to the Shakespeares themselves). On October 25, 1583, Somerville left his home a few miles from Stratford and headed to London intending to shoot the queen. But he was intercepted the next day on the London road, near Aynho, and conveyed to the Tower. His interrogators quickly learned that his orders came from “his allies and kin” and a warrant was issued to apprehend all “such as shall be in any way akin to all touched and to search their houses.”

  The leaders of the plot were put to death and Somerville himself was found strangled on the eve of his execution—perhaps to prevent him from revealing too much about the conspiracy from the scaffold. His head, along with Edward Arden’s, was mounted on stakes atop London Bridge. What Shakespeare knew about the plot, whether any of his Arden relations were investigated or suspected, even what his own sympathies were, is lost to us. But apparently he didn’t forget Somerville. There’s an otherwise inexplicable moment in The Third Part of Henry the Sixth where the Earl of Warwick looks for his enemy, Clarence, in the wrong direction, and is corrected by a Warwickshireman who speaks briefly, then disappears. This bit character’s name, efficiently immortalized, is Somerville.

  In the months preceding the composition of Julius Caesar there were a rash of attempts upon Elizabeth’s life. The government eagerly publicized them, striking a propaganda blow against a much hated domestic enemy, the tireless and hounded English Jesuits. Word of the most notorious of these plots—by a hapless Englishman named Edward Squires—circulated widely. During his travels in England in the fall of 1599, Thomas Platter recorded in his journal that “but a short time before, an attempt had been made to poison the queen by smearing powder on the chair she was accustomed to sit and hold her hands on.” Platter got the facts slightly wrong, though perhaps he was only recording a version of the story in currency at the time.

  Edward Squires was a down-on-his-luck scrivener from Greenwich who found employment in the queen’s stables and then sought to improve his fortunes by joining Sir Francis Drake’s privateering voyage of 1595. Squires sailed in the Francis, which was captured by the Spanish and its crew taken prisoner of war and imprisoned in Seville. English Jesuits in Spain, from where they plotted the restoration of Catholicism in England, were given access to these prisoners and singled out those who could potentially be converted and persuaded to infiltrate England and act against the queen. This process of recruiting prisoners—which included years of threats, isolation, confrontation, and confusion—depended on a kind of brainwashing. Of course, the Jesuits could never be sure if they had succeeded or whether those they were releasing were merely good actors who had won parole.

  Squires and his friend Richard Rolles were released in the summer of 1597 and headed home. Upon reaching London, Squires immediately signed on with Essex’s fleet, bound for the Azores, dur
ing which voyage, he later confessed, he poisoned “the Earl’s chair where he used to sit and lay his hand.” Before setting sail he visited his old workplace, the queen’s stables, “and understanding that her Majesty’s horses were preparing for her to ride abroad, as the horse stood ready saddled in the stable yard, I went to the horse and in the hearing of divers thereabouts, said ‘God save the Queen,’ and therewith laid my hand on the pommel of the saddle, and out of a bladder, which I had made full of holes with a big pin, poisoned the pommel, it being covered with velvet and soon after, her Majesty rode abroad.” Both assassination attempts failed, and after returning from the Azores, Squires went back to work in the stables. His actions were only exposed a year later when John Stanley and William Monday, another pair of Englishmen similarly released from Spain by Jesuit handlers with plans to take the queen’s life, arrived in London. Stanley’s insistence upon a private audience with Elizabeth quickly attracted attention, and under interrogation he implicated not only himself but Squires and Rolles as well.

  The conspiracies were taken seriously at the highest levels of government, and Essex, Cecil, Francis Bacon, and Edward Coke all personally participated in interrogating the suspects. Some of the conspirators were tortured, and all were executed—Squires being hung, disemboweled, then quartered at Tyburn on November 13, 1598. Francis Bacon anonymously authored the semiofficial version of the story, published in 1599: A Letter Written out of England… Containing a True Report of a Strange Conspiracy. The English Jesuits, whose cause was damaged by the case, opted for denial, and had Martin Array publish in Rome a counterblast, The Discovery and Confutation of a Tragical Fiction.