A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  The boys’ pint-size appearance was perfect for parodying their rivals. And their uncracked voices were a strong selling point in so musically attuned a culture (Elizabethan England produced only a few painters of note, such as Isaac Oliver and Nicholas Hilliard, but the talent in musical composition was deep). Adult players could sword fight, dance, and carry a tune, but only a handful, including Armin, could compete musically with the children, who were after all trained choristers. The Chamberlain’s Men would find themselves caught between the popular fare of rival adult companies and the intimate offerings of the boys.

  If the children’s companies highlighted boys and song, the Chamberlain’s Men could, too. As You Like It includes an unprecedented six boy actors (as opposed to the usual pair). A lesser dramatist might have simply responded to the vogue for boys and their singing by adding a tune or two. Shakespeare chose to write more songs—five in all, three sung by adults, two by boys—than he would in any other play. Thinking of As You Like It as an embryonic musical may help explain why critics have had such a hard time with its meager, episodic plot, its rich vein of contemporary satire, its over-the-top climax where the god Hymen enters, and all its song and dance. The same ingredients, viewed from the perspective of musical comedy, make perfect sense. It’s as if Shakespeare was feeling his way toward something not yet imaginable, for over a century would pass before the first English musical, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, was staged in 1728. It’s not entirely clear whether Shakespeare was fully aware of where his art was leading him, and in retrospect, this turns out to be one of the paths not taken, its tracks almost fully covered over.

  But that wasn’t the case in the years after the English musical became a sensation. Producers immediately recognized how little reworking it took to turn As You Like It into a fully fledged musical. When it was revived in 1740, for example, it was padded out with a song lifted from Love’s Labor’s Lost. And by the time it was put on at the Theatre Royal at York in 1789, Celia, Phoebe, and Amiens all had singing parts, and more music—including a hornpipe solo at the end of act 1—was added as well. By 1824, at Drury Lane, you couldn’t call it anything else but a musical, with a slew of songs added from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, The Passionate Pilgrim, and Venus and Adonis, and a new finale—“An Allegorical Dance and Chorus of Aeriel Spirits”—brought in to replace the older and tired one starring Hymen.

  Some of the songs Shakespeare wrote for As You Like It have a thematic function; others seem to be included simply to satisfy the audience’s desire to hear good singing. The most accomplished of these songs is “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” which appears in act 5, scene 3—a scene with no other purpose than to introduce it. It’s sung by two boys, introduced as the “Duke’s pages,” who go out of their way to remind us that they’re professionals who sing without making excuses, “without hawking or spitting or saying we are hoarse, which are the only prologues to a bad voice”:

  It was a lover and his lass,

  With a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no,

  That o’er the green cornfield did pass

  In the springtime, the only pretty ring-time.

  When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding.

  Sweet lovers love the spring,

  And therefore take the present time,

  With a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no.

  For love is crowned with the prime.

  In springtime, etc.

  (5.3.16 ff.)

  Original music for “It was a lover and his lass” survives, set for voice, lute, and bass viol, and was published shortly after it was first staged in Thomas Morley’s The First Book of Ayres in 1600. Morley was one of the leading musicians and composers of the day and until recently had been Shakespeare’s neighbor in Bishopsgate Ward. The best explanation for why the same song appears in both Shakespeare’s and Morley’s published work is that Shakespeare had sought out Morley as a collaborator. Lyrics in musical theater don’t count for much unless they are accompanied by first-rate tunes. It looks like the two artists worked on this song together, Shakespeare providing the words, Morley the music, leaving both free to publish the joint venture independently. If so, audiences at the Globe would have been treated to an inspired collaboration between England’s leading lyricist and one of its finest composers. If there are any lost Shakespearean lyrics still to be discovered, it’s likely that they will be found in the anonymous songs in collections like Morley’s Book of Ayres.

  IN THE FINAL SCENE OF THE PLAY, SHAKESPEARE PULLS OUT ALL THE STOPS. There is nothing in his earlier works—or indeed in earlier scenes of As You Like It—to prepare audiences for this grand finale. He had taken naturalism unusually far in this artificial pastoral, but, as he subsequently showed in his late romances, naturalism, too, had its limits and was not an end in itself. Rosalind (as “Ganymede”) slips offstage, promising to return and magically produce the actual Rosalind. She returns, along with Hymen, god of marriage. This divine intervention is unnecessary, for Shakespeare had already resolved all outstanding conflicts. Shakespeare again offers his audience more than they expected, for the scene is the first masque in his work, anticipating by roughly a decade those in The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. Bridging the divide between courtly and popular theater, Shakespeare makes available to ordinary playgoers a taste of the expensive and spectacular symbolic drama of the court.

  Modern directors, drawn to the play’s naturalism, are mystified by the Masque of Hymen and most go to any length to work around it, playing it as a joke rather than the transcendent scene Shakespeare had written. Nowadays, as often as not, the actor playing Corin or another minor rustic character recites Hymen’s lines and the scene becomes a little playlet stage-managed with a wink and a nod by Rosalind. From the perspective of these directors, the play has already worked its magic, and they’re at a loss to deal with Shakespeare cutting back across the grain, introducing a god in his search for a more profound comic pattern.

  While we don’t know what audiences made of it four hundred years ago at the Globe, we do know that the Masque of Hymen marshals all the special effects that Shakespeare had at his command. The stage directions don’t make clear how Hymen enters, but there’s a possibility that, like the divine entrances in Shakespeare’s late plays, Hymen appears from above, descending in a throne from the cover of the Globe’s stage. If so, it shows off for the first time at the Globe the stage technology previously unavailable to Shakespeare’s company at the Theatre or Curtain. Hymen enters to the sound of “still music” and intones:

  Peace, ho! I bar confusion.

  ’Tis I must make conclusion

  Of these most strange events.

  Here’s eight that must take hands

  To join in Hymen’s bands,

  If truth holds true contents.

  (5.4.124–29)

  The four pairs of lovers—Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver, Phoebe and Silvius, and Audrey and Touchstone—come forward and are confirmed in their vows and a final song follows, celebrating the act of marriage that is at the heart of comedy:

  Wedding is great Juno’s crown,

  O blessed bond of board and bed!

  ’Tis hymen peoples every town;

  High wedlock then be honored.

  Honor, high honor and renown,

  To Hymen, god of every town!

  (5.4.140–45)

  Duke Senior, following up on Hymen’s order that the eight lovers “must take hands,” calls for the formal dance that symbolically ends both masque and play, specifying “measures” or a stately court dance like a pavan: “Play, music! And you, brides and bridegrooms all, / With measure heaped in joy, to th’ measures fall” (5.4.177–78). Shakespeare seems to have gone a step further here than he had recently done with the ending of Julius Caesar. After seeing Julius Caesar at the Globe, Thomas Platter recorded in his notebook that “at the end of the play they danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully, according to their
custom, two in each group dressed in men’s and two in women’s apparel.” Alan Brissenden persuasively argues that the extremely elegant (“überausz zierlich”) dance Platter describes was most likely a court dance, such as a “pavan, almain, or even the faster coranto.” The formal dance tagged on to the end of Julius Caesar in lieu of a jig had become with As You Like It part of the fabric of the play itself.

  If this were not enough to absorb, one last innovation follows, for the play ends but doesn’t stop here. Once the dance is over and the other characters exit, the young actor who played Rosalind steps forward to interact with the audience directly, in an epilogue. The audience would have been shocked by this, and the actor must begin by defending why “Rosalind” defies convention in this way: “It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue” (Epilogue, 1–3). Now that the play is over, does this young actor recite these lines in his own voice or is he still playing a woman’s part? If he hasn’t dropped his voice a register (speaking, say, as “Ganymede”) or taken off his wig, how are we to know if we are supposed to be hearing a man or a woman? Halfway through the epilogue the actor himself takes up this delicate question, making unambiguous that, though still dressed as a woman, he’s really a young man: “If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not” (Epilogue, 16–19). Though he assures us that he’s not a woman, seconds later he curtsies rather than bows to us. This is more realism that we bargained for. But Shakespeare is quick to remind us, as human as we feel Rosalind is, there’s a young actor who really is human and deserves our applause; Rosalind is a fiction and realism a convention, an illusion. To the very end, Shakespeare insists that we share the play’s skepticism about conventionality. Once last time he confounds our expectations, forcing us to abandon the self-satisfaction that comes from watching the characters discover in the end what we knew all along. Rosalind’s last conditional “If” (a word repeated about once a minute in the play) reminds us that unlike comic closure, real life is open-ended and provisional.

  Nowhere else in his works does Shakespeare break the frame in quite so disconcerting a way, confronting us with the fact that we are watching cross-dressed actors and that we are complicit in the lie upon which Elizabethan theater depends. Even as we believe that Shakespeare’s plays are made of truth, he reminds us that we know he lies. We are left, in the end, in Orlando’s shoes: educated and delighted by Rosalind, forgetful at times that we are listening to a boy playing the part of a woman, and in danger of being a bit too comfortable with conventions, with how we like it.

  The suppression of simple truth—cousin to what Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief”—turns out to be at the core of the theatrical experience. In exchange for forgetting that Rosalind is really a boy playing a woman’s part, we, like Orlando, are rewarded with more complex truths. In the end, play is what’s real, and in the epilogue, Rosalind—or whoever it is that is speaking to us—won’t let us forget it: “I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to me, to like as much of this play as please you; and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women—as I perceive by your simpering, none of you hates them—that between you and the women the play may please” (Epilogue, 11–16). Jaques had it right: all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. The epilogue is an assertive ending to a daring play. Shakespeare had offered more and demanded more in return. If playgoers missed the point, it would have been underscored for them a final time as they filed out of the new theater. On the sign the Chamberlain’s Men displayed outside the Globe was a reminder: “Totus mundus agit histrionem”—we’re all players.

  – 12 –

  The Forest of Arden

  It was time for Shakespeare to head home. Neighbors told the seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey that Shakespeare “was wont to go into Warwickshire once a year,” though he probably made the trip more often than that, even if in 1599 he may have had to postpone visiting during the hectic months in which the Globe was under construction. By late summer, though, a great deal was going on in Stratford that demanded his presence.

  His family needed him. Joan Hathaway, his wife’s mother (or possibly stepmother), was dying. Shakespeare was close enough to the Hathaway family to have recently looked into buying “some odd yardland”—an open-field holding of thirty or so acres—near their farmhouse in Shottery, on the verge of the Forest of Arden. Joan, who had been widowed since Richard Hathaway’s death in 1581, lived with Anne’s brothers (or stepbrothers), John, Thomas, and William, and her sister Margaret. They were helped by the family’s longtime shepherd, Thomas Whittington. If Shakespeare needed a model for the generous and devoted servant Adam in As You Like It, he didn’t have to look further than Whittington, who left in his will fifty pounds for “the poor people of Stratford,” including the “forty shillings that is in the hand of Anne Shakespeare, wife unto Master William Shakespeare.” Ties still bound Anne, and by extension her husband, to her old household. Anne had been nineteen when her stepbrother John was born and lived under the same roof for nine more years until she married Shakespeare. She probably helped Joan raise the younger children and must have been concerned when John was mustered in November 1596 and then again this summer, when he joined other trained men ordered to drill with muskets at nearby Alcester on July 19. There’s no record of whether he was subsequently called up to defend against the Spanish threat or shipped off to fight in Ireland. Shakespeare may have found in his young brother-in-law a good source of information on mustering and the military.

  If Shakespeare missed Joan Hathaway’s funeral on September 5, he may have arrived home in time for a wedding. No later than this summer, though perhaps sometime earlier, there was cause to celebrate: his sister Joan, age thirty, got married. We don’t know the exact date Joan wedded William Hart, a hatter; but we know that by November she was pregnant with their first child, a son who would be given his godfather’s name, William. It was not a wedding that Shakespeare would have missed. She was his only surviving sister, a first Joan having died in infancy in 1558, followed by Margaret, a baby, in 1563, and Anne, age eight, in 1579. Joan was also Shakespeare’s only sibling to marry (his brothers—Gilbert, who was two years younger, Richard, born when he was about to turn ten, and Edmund, born in 1580 when Shakespeare was sixteen—all died bachelors). For Shakespeare’s mother and father, who were around seventy, an advanced age at the time, Joan’s marriage must have been a mixed blessing, for she had lived with them in their house on Henley Street and would now have to attend to their needs as well as her husband’s and soon her child’s (the newlyweds moved into the western part of the house). Joan must have been attached to the place, which Shakespeare inherited, and Shakespeare allowed her to stay there for life for the nominal fee of twelve pence a year. Shakespeare appears to have remained on warm terms with his sister and bequeathed her “twenty pounds and all my wearing apparel.”

  FAMILY DEMANDS ASIDE, THERE WERE PRACTICAL REASONS FOR SHAKESPEARE to travel home during the summer months. The season was sunnier and drier, which meant that the roads would be in better shape. The most direct route from London to Stratford, by way of High Wycombe and Oxford, was ninety-four miles, a three-days’ journey by horse when the weather was fair and the roads decent. Had Shakespeare set forth by early September, when the sun rose and set around six, he would have had a comfortable twelve hours of daylight in which to ride, four fewer than in mid-July, but four more than in the dark days of December.

  Shakespeare’s trip home probably began at the Bell Inn on Carter Lane near St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he would likely have hired a gelding for the journey from William Greenaway. Greenaway was Stratford’s main carrier. He had been plying the route between his hometown and London since at least 1581, and for the next twenty years played an indispensable role carrying letters, messages, food, goods, and gossip back and for
th. The Greenaways were near neighbors of the Shakespeares, living a few houses down on Henley Street. Greenaway probably conveyed the terrible news to Shakespeare of his son Hamnet’s death as well as of the devastating fires in Stratford in 1594 and 1595 (the house where Shakespeare’s family lived narrowly escaped the flames; the Greenaways were not so fortunate). Leading citizens in Stratford who needed to contact Shakespeare had Greenaway serve as a go-between: “Your letter of 25 of October came to my hands the last of the same at night per Greenaway,” Abraham Sturley wrote to Adrian Quyney on November 4, 1598, “which imported that our countryman, William Shakespeare, would procure us money.”