A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  The call to arms was heeded in the city by both rich and poor. This wasn’t Ireland; they were defending their families, their homes, their queen, and country. John Chamberlain declared that “though I were never professed soldier, to offer my self in defense of my country… is the best service I can do it.” After casting a horoscope to learn whether the Spanish would attack, the enthusiastic astrologer Simon Forman went overboard, purchasing “much harness and weapons for war, swords, daggers, muskets, corslet, and furniture, staves, halberds, gauntlets, mails, &c.” A contemporary survey of the mustering of the “armed and trained companies in London” in 1599 gives a vivid impression of its citizen army. Many of the captains leading their neighbors had served in a similar capacity in 1588. John Megges, draper merchant, led 125 men from Queenhyth Ward while 250 men of Cripplegate Ward followed merchant tailor John Swynerton, and so on, throughout the various wards. All told, this London muster lists fifteen captains leading 3,375 men from twenty-five wards.

  And what about Shakespeare? As a servant of the lord chamberlain, did he join up with those who wore the privy counsellor’s livery and attend upon the queen herself at Nonsuch? And, if so, did his new status as a gentleman lead him to acquire a horse? Or did he decide instead to ride out of town against the sea of defenders heading south, heading back home to Stratford-upon-Avon, convincing himself that at this time of crisis it was best to be by his family’s side and out of immediate harm’s way? The answer to this would tell us a great deal about what kind of person Shakespeare was. But we don’t have a clue what he did. The best guess is that, like others in the theater, he stayed in London, followed events closely, and kept performing and writing. There’s no indication that the authorities banned playgoing at this time, and there’s a likelihood that, with thousands of volunteers in town milling about with nothing to do but drill and wait for the invaders to land, the theaters may have done a brisk business—and from the government’s perspective proved a helpful distraction, keeping the armed and idle forces preoccupied.

  Henslowe’s Diary certainly shows no sign of interruption in the regular routine of commissioning and writing plays through this crisis. Chapman, Dekker, and Jonson were particularly busy. At the end of July, Chapman was at work on a “pastoral ending in a tragedy,” for which he received forty shillings on July 27. Dekker was caught up in a frenzy of playwriting, taking payment on August 1 for Bear a Brain and nine days later sharing an advance with Ben Jonson for Page of Plymouth, a tragedy that they finished in three weeks. The two teamed up again at the beginning of September along with Henry Chettle “and other gentlemen” on another lost tragedy, Robert the Second, King of Scots (capitalizing on the current of anti-Scottish sentiment, for Robert II, James’s lineal ancestor, was one of the weakest monarchs ever to rule in that kingdom). If any of London’s playwrights could be expected to bear arms, it would have been Jonson, a native of the city who had seen military service in the Low Countries (and bragged about killing an enemy soldier there in solo combat). Yet even he was devoting this time to writing—not just collaborative work for the Admiral’s Men but also a solo-authored sequel to Every Man in His Humour that he hoped to sell to the Chamberlain’s Men. Henry Chettle and Thomas Haughton were also paid for plays at the height of the armada scare, the former for The Stepmother’s Tragedy, and the latter for The Poor Man’s Paradise. And if Michael Drayton, Wilson, Hathaway, and Anthony Munday were to complete the First Part of Sir John Oldcastle and begin its sequel by mid-October, it’s likely that they were already collaborating in August on the first part. Finally, John Chamberlain’s allusion to the collapse of a house on St. John’s Street where a puppet show was being staged in mid-August offers further evidence that, armada or not, London’s entertainment industry did not come to a halt.

  Two plays in the Chamberlain’s Men’s repertory were particularly well suited to the moment. One was Henry the Fifth, celebrating as it did English military greatness (though, in light of doubts raised about Essex’s Irish campaign and rumors that this mobilization had something to do with him, the play’s allusion to our “General” returning from Ireland “with rebellion broached on his sword” would surely have been dropped). Shakespeare’s company would probably have dusted off another timely play in their repertory, A Larum for London: Or, the Siege of Antwerp, published not long after. The opening of the play graphically recounts how Antwerp was overrun when its citizens ignored the Spanish threat and put self-interest ahead of the common good:

  The citizens (were they but politic,

  Careful and studious to preserve their peace)

  Might at an hour’s warning, fill their streets,

  With forty thousand well appointed soldiers.

  It wasn’t a particularly good play—and it gives a sense of how uneven the offerings of Shakespeare’s company could be—but it got its point across. Spectators would have looked on in horror as a family of four, including a blind father, is butchered. An Englishman in the wrong place at the wrong time is tortured, literally strappadoed onstage—yanked up and down by a rope by his arms, which are pinioned behind him. Virgins and matrons are attacked and threatened with rape, and the libidinous Spaniards even begin to strip one of their victims onstage. It was the Elizabethans’ worst nightmare, all the more powerful if revived at this time, for playgoers knew that the same treacherous enemy was heading their way. Unlike their negligent fellow Protestants in Antwerp, though, Londoners were armed and ready.

  As August dragged on there was still no sign of the Spanish. The more time passed, the wilder the speculation about what was really happening. Chamberlain writes:

  The vulgar sort cannot be persuaded but that there was some great mystery in the assembling of these forces, and because they cannot find the reason of it, make many wild conjectures, and cast beyond the moon, as sometimes that the Queen was dangerously sick, otherwhile that it was to show to some that are absent, that others can be followed as well as they, and that if occasion be, military services can be as well and readily ordered and directed as if they were present with many other as vain and frivolous imaginations as these. The forces in the west country are not yet dismissed, for there, if anywhere, may be some doubt of danger.

  His cryptic allusions to those that “are absent” and to the “danger” expected by the defensive forces in the “west country” both point to Essex, suggesting that there were fears that he might abandon Ireland, land with a military force in Wales, and march against his adversaries at court.

  By the third week of August, the strain, both psychological and financial, was enormous. The Privy Council continued to receive conflicting reports about Spanish plans and didn’t know what to believe. Unscrupulous tradesmen were overcharging the gathered troops and the lord admiral had to publish a decree outlawing profiteering. The treasury, already drained by the Irish campaign, was nearly dry, yet somehow had to cover the enormous expense of supporting all these soldiers and sailors. By mid-August Elizabeth made a point of asking Thomas Windebank to remind Cecil to keep a closer eye on the skyrocketing costs of the mobilization: “Yester evening,” he wrote the secretary of state, “at her Majesty’s going to horse, she called me to her,” and “willed me write unto you these few words: ‘that there should not be too much taken out of an emptied purse, for therein was no charity.’” In addition, the vast numbers of laborers drawn from their fields during harvest could lead to large-scale rioting or rebellion. After a string of crop failures from 1594 to 1597 due to terrible weather, the government couldn’t afford to induce yet another bad harvest because of misguided policy. On August 17, the defenders in the south—the Earl of Bath, Sir Ferdinand Gorges, and others—dismissed those gathered to defend the coast, justifying their decision on the ground that they “received this day credible intelligence that no part of the enemy’s fleet is at Brest or Conquet.” For the troops, it was not a moment too soon: “Their estate had been most pitiful if they had not been sent home to help in their harvest, for by reason of the
foul weather and want of help, their corn was almost utterly lost.”

  By August 20, Elizabeth had had enough and told the lord admiral to “dismiss our loving subjects assembled together by virtue of our former commandment.” He thought it a mistake but not an order he could refuse. So the city began to empty again, the danger thought to be past. On August 23, a much relieved John Chamberlain wrote cheerfully that “the storm that seemed to look so black [is] almost quite blown over…. Our land forces are daily discharged little and little, and this day I think will be quite dissolved.”

  Yet even as Chamberlain sent off his letter, new and terrifying reports arrived at court. One, from Plymouth, reported that the Spanish were about to “land in some part of England 15,000 men, and assure themselves of another 15,000 English papists ready to assist them at their landing.” Their likely destination: Milford Haven. By Saturday the twenty-fifth there was no longer any doubt, and the Privy Council informed the lord mayor and the Earl of Cumberland that the Spanish “must needs be on the coast of England by this time.” The troops so recently dismissed had to be recalled, “the armed force of the city” put “in readiness,” and the Thames defended “to impeach the coming up of the [Spanish] galleys.” It was “now high time,” the councillors added, “for every subject to show his duty and affection to their sovereign and country.” The following days were tense and spectacular. On August 26, three thousand citizen soldiers “were all in armor in the streets, attending on their captains till past seven of the clock, at which time, being thoroughly wet by a great shower of rain,” they “were sent home again for that day.” The following morning “the other 3,000 citizens, householders and subsidy men, showed on the Mile’s End, where they trained all that day.

  The drilling and martial display continued unabated through September 4. Whatever the threat had been, by then, the danger really had passed, and an exhausted country did its best to return to normal. Elizabeth quietly removed to Hampton Court where, according to one report, she was seen through the windows of the palace, “none being with her but my Lady Warwick”—“dancing ‘The Spanish Panic’ ” to pipe and tabor. The tune was aptly named. Elizabeth had a right to high step it: she had nimbly dodged disaster yet again. The crisis was over. What had caused it remained disputed. The well-placed Francis Bacon refused to accept the official version. The claim that the Spanish were coming, he wrote, was “a tale… given out by which even the wiser sort might well be taken in.” Perhaps if he had access to all the intelligence reports and intercepts in Cecil’s possession he might have thought differently. Perhaps not. Cecil himself, who knew for certain of Spanish preparations (though against whom was the sticking point) admitted in the midst of the crisis that he overreacted, but defended himself on the grounds that the “world is ever apt to cry crucifige [crucify him] upon me, as they have done on my father before me, whensoever I do dissuade these preparations.”

  Bacon later maintained that “all this was done to the end that Essex, hearing that the kingdom was in arms, might be deterred from any attempt to bring the Irish army over into England.” It was as good a theory as any. Why else had the queen forbidden Essex from returning to England without her permission? To the English farmers called away from their fields, the false alarm was an embittering experience. They had seen the effects of dearth, and some had buried kin and neighbors who died of famine or famine-related disease. A year before the armada threat of 1599 a Kentish laborer had been brought up on charges for saying that the real war to be fought was between the rich and the poor, and that “he hoped to see such a war in this realm to afflict the rich men of this country to requite their hardness of heart against the poor.” Francis Bacon also remembered the people “muttering that if the Council had celebrated this kind of Maygame in the beginning of May, it might have been thought more suitable, but to call the people away from the harvest for it (for it was now full autumn) was too serious a jest.” Bacon saw that the English people were shrewd enough to see through their government’s story, “insomuch that they forbore not from scoffs, saying that in the year ’88 Spain had sent an Invincible Armada against us and now she had sent an Invisible Armada.”

  The difference was clear. The two armada threats framed the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign and the comparison was not a flattering one. In 1588, the queen had girded herself for battle and, according to a later report, reassured her subjects as they gathered in defense of the realm at Tilbury that she was “resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live and die amongst you all, to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people mine honor and my blood even in the dust.” They were words that rivaled the stirring speeches of Henry V to his outnumbered troops at Agincourt. This time around she did not appear in public; like a queen bee she stayed hidden in her hive, protected by thousands who swarmed to her defense. She must have sensed that propagandistic speeches or even a royal appearance would no longer be effective. Her people were now too suspicious, their skepticism fed by seemingly endless conscription, faction at court, and uncertainty about political and religious succession. It was also nurtured by the historical drama of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights, who over the past decade had taught them, among other things, to be wary of the motives of rulers. Censorship over what could be said about Ireland or royal succession and the control over royal images, satire, and history couldn’t stop the muttering and certainly couldn’t bring back that sense of promise and Providence that had followed the victory over the “Invincible Armada” of 1588. Politically and artistically, there was no going back.

  LONDON’S DRAMATISTS RESPONDED TO THE ARMADA THREAT OF 1599 IN markedly different ways. For some, like John Marston, it offered a chance for a throwaway line and a sardonic laugh—“The Spanish are coming!”—in his Histriomastix, probably performed by Paul’s Boys later that autumn. Others worked the threat into the fabric of plays in progress, most notably Thomas Heywood, whose two-part Edward the Fourth, entered in the Stationers’ Register on August 28, and rushed into print before the end of the year, must have been revised with the crisis in mind. Playgoers attending a performance of Heywood’s play at the Boar’s Head Inn during the armada scare would have had the uncanny experience of watching their ancestors confront a threat nearly identical to their own. The third scene of the play, which opens with the Mayor leading his fellow citizen-defenders—“whole companies / Of mercers, grocers, drapers, and the rest”—explicitly collapses the distance between past and present. The Mayor asks, “Have ye commanded that in every street / They hang forth lights as soon as night comes on?” We soon learn that London’s “streets are chained, / The bridge well manned, and every place prepared.” Heywood even has his historical Mayor wonder, anachronistically, “What if we stop the passage of the Thames / With such provision as we have of ships?” The analogy is far more complicated, though, for in Edward the Fourth Londoners defend their city not against foreign invaders but against an English army, led by Falconbridge, intent on freeing the deposed King Henry VI from the Tower. And Heywood quietly suppresses the fact that the Earl of Essex’s ancestor had come to the aid of London’s citizens. As the political winds kept shifting this year, so, too, did the meaning of Heywood’s play.

  Other playwrights made no pretense of masking current events in past histories. In October, for example, an anonymous and now lost play—whether it was staged publicly or privately is unclear—celebrated the recent victory of English troops over Spanish forces at Turnhout in the Low Countries. The actors were deliberately made up to resemble English leaders down to their distinctive beards and doublet and hose: “This afternoon I saw The Overthrow of Turnhold played,” writes Rowland Whyte, “and saw Sir Robert Sidney and Sir Francis Vere upon the stage, killing, slaying, and overthrowing the Spaniard.”

  It took some time for Shakespeare to digest what was happening around him and turn it into art. Before 1599 was over, he would hit upon how his next tragedy would begin—with jittery soldiers, at night, standing gua
rd. One of them isn’t even sure what he’s guarding against and wonders if anyone can tell him the reason for the frenzied military preparation going on around him:

  Why this same strict and most observant watch

  So nightly toils the subject of the land,

  And with such daily cost of brazen cannon

  And foreign mart for implements of war,

  Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task

  Does not divide the Sunday from the week?

  (Hamlet, 1.1.71–76)

  The time is out of joint, the mood dark, the threats multiple and uncertain. For many Londoners, recalling their experience of the past August, the opening scene of Hamlet would have brought a shudder of recognition. But this is getting ahead of our story.

  – 10 –

  The Passionate Pilgrim

  We don’t know who first mentioned to Shakespeare, no later than April or May, that a new book of his poems, The Passionate Pilgrim by W. Shakespeare, was for sale at William Leake’s bookshop at the sign of the Greyhound in Paul’s Churchyard (and perhaps elsewhere as well). At long last some of his prized sonnets, which until now had circulated only among those Francis Meres called Shakespeare’s “private friends,” were available in print. The news would have come as a surprise. While Shakespeare couldn’t deny that some of the sonnets in The Passionate Pilgrim were his, he had nothing to do with their publication. And though the book advertised his authorship—testimony to his growing popularity—he didn’t profit from its sale.