A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  Epilogue

  The holiday season at year’s end began ominously. On the Sunday before Christmas, London was buffeted by southwesterly winds that toppled chimneys, blew lead off church steeples, and knocked over trees and barns. A passenger boat heading downriver to Gravesend capsized, drowning most of the thirty men and women aboard. The day after Christmas, Shakespeare and his fellow players made their way back to court, now at Richmond, for an evening performance. The Admiral’s Men would play there the following night and again on New Year’s, before it was once more the Chamberlain’s Men’s turn on Twelfth Night. The queen, Rowland Whyte reported, “graced the dancing and plays with her own presence.”

  Much had changed since Shakespeare had last visited Richmond on Shrove Tuesday. Essex had been at the height of his popularity, preparing to lead an army to crush Tyrone. He was now under house arrest with little hope of reprieve, humiliated by Star Chamber proceedings against him in late November and in failing health. A week earlier, word had circulated in London that Essex was dead, and “the bells tolled for him.” The news was false, but ministers in London read special prayers, and politics spilled into the pews: on Christmas Day, a parish clerk of St. Andrew’s in the Wardrobe had asked God to “look mercifully… upon… thy servant the Earl of Essex” and “in thy good time restore him to his former health,” to the “grief and discomfort of all wicked Edomites that bear ill-will to him.” The authorities found this intolerable. Rowland Whyte, perhaps unconsciously echoing the words describing the fate of the tribunes “put to silence” in Julius Caesar, reported the fallout: “Many ministers that made public prayers for [Essex] in their churches are commended to silence; some, indeed, foolishly forgetting themselves, their doubtful speeches tending to sedition.”

  Back in February, Tyrone was braced for an English attack. Now with Essex and his freshly dubbed knights gone, and Lord Mountjoy not yet officially appointed to succeed him, Tyrone gave notice that he was letting the truce expire. It was feared, Fynes Morison wrote, that “the rebels would presently assault the English Pale,” and sure enough, by the end of November rumors reached London that Tyrone “comes with all his force” and “that all her Majesty’s subjects do leave their houses in the country and retire to the towns.” The “very heart of the kingdom,” Morison wrote, “now languished under the contagion of rebellion.” Since the previous Christmas several thousand English soldiers were dead or maimed and tens of thousands of pounds wasted. The English forces still in the field “were altogether out of heart.” A confident Tyrone, promised support by the pope and the King of Spain, promoted himself as the champion of “Irish liberty and Romish religion.” Fresh English troops would have to be conscripted and new subsidies exacted if Mountjoy were to succeed where Essex failed.

  The poet John Donne, who was at court at Richmond for the Christmas holidays, diagnosed with his usual acuity the extraordinary disjunction between the cheerful mood at court and the sobering reality beyond the palace walls:

  The court is not great but full of jollity and revels and plays and as merry as if it were not sick. Her Majesty is well disposed and very gracious in public to my Lord Mountjoy. My Lord of Essex and his train are no more missed here than the angels which were cast down from heaven nor (for anything I see) likelier to return. He withers in his sickness and plods on to his end in the same pace where you left us. The worst accidents of his sickness are that he conspires with it and yet it is not here believed.

  They had lived through the fall of angels—though even Donne was unaware that the fallen ones were secretly plotting their return. With his sharp eye for paradox, Donne also marveled how the court was in denial about how sick it was, even as Essex, who conspired in his own illness, wasn’t believed. When John Weever wrote an ironic satire to usher in the new year—“A Prophesy of This Present Year, 1600,” published some months later in his Faunus and Melliflora—he began it with an epigraph, “Who lives past ninety-nine, / Shall afterward speak of a blessed time.” The couplet is purposely ambiguous, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the time before or after 1599 was blessed. Weever’s so-called prophecy turns on the joke that everything was fine in England, there was nothing to satirize, all is “spotless pure” in “these halcyon times.”

  Elizabeth appeared rejuvenated at the year-end festivities, in “very good health,” and spent most of her evenings in the presence chamber watching “the ladies dance the old and new country dances, with the tabor and pipe.” She may have been amused to have seen so many of those who were waiting for her to die in ill health themselves: this December the lord admiral was sick at Chelsea, the lord keeper sick in London, Lord Herbert sick of an ague, Ralegh recovering from one, and Essex reportedly at death’s door. She might outlive them all.

  A highlight of the holiday season at court was the exchange of gifts on New Year’s Day. Courtiers went out of their way to show their devotion to the queen, and each of their gifts was carefully recorded. So, too, were Elizabeth’s gifts in return: she rewarded her generous subjects—according to their rank and favor—with gilt plate. Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper, was listed first among the gift givers and sent a gold amulet garnished with rubies and pearls. The lord admiral gave a golden necklace adorned with rubies, pearl, and topaz. Secretary of State Cecil presented the queen with seven sprigs of gold, decorated with rubies, diamonds, and pearls. Scores of lesser gifts followed: some gave gold, others perfumed gloves, and still others clothing (Elizabeth had several thousand outfits in her wardrobe and welcomed more). Francis Bacon presented an embroidered white satin petticoat along with a note wishing the queen “that we may continue to reckon on, and ever, your Majesty’s happy years of reign; and they that reckon upon any other hopes, I would they might reckon short, and to their cost.” The most spectacular gift of all this New Year’s was an “exceedingly rich” one that came “as it were, in a cloud, no man knows how.” It was neither “received nor rejected,” and never made it onto the gift roll. It was offered by Essex and ignored by the queen.

  Sir John Harington wisely shunned the court and sent from his country home a handsome gift to his godmother, Elizabeth. A friend reported back to him that his “present to the Queen was well accepted of; she did much commend your verse, nor did she less praise your prose.” Harington, taking no chances, had also sent along something to eat and that, too, went over well: “The Queen hath tasted your dainties and saith you have marvelous skill in cooking of good fruits.” Harington was still recovering from a harrowing interview with Elizabeth after returning from Ireland—which he diplomatically described as “a full and gracious audience in the withdrawing chamber at Whitehall, where herself being accuser, judge, and witness, I was cleared and graciously dismissed.” Only much later did he confide in a friend what happened: “I shall never put out of remembrance her Majesty’s displeasure. I entered her chamber, but she frowned and said, ‘What, did the fool [Essex] bring you too? Go back to your business.’” “She chafed much, walked fastly to and from looked with discomposure in her visage” and when he kneeled to her, she “swore ‘By God’s Son, I am no Queen, that man [Essex] is above me; who gave him command to come here so soon?’” His journal of the Irish campaign, which she demanded and he shared, appeased her anger. Harington beat a hasty retreat to his home in Keslton, near Bath—“I did not stay to be bidden twice, if all the Irish rebels had been at my heels, I should not have had better speed.” We have Harington to thank for one of the most poignant anecdotes about Elizabeth, recorded a year or so later, which captures a moment when life seemed to imitate art, in this case Hamlet: “She walks much in her privy chamber, and stamps with her feet at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword at times into the arras in great rage.”

  Once again, the holiday season provided an opportunity for some of the best plays of the year, vetted by the master of the revels, to be staged before Elizabeth. This Christmas Thomas Dekker took the laurel, for he alone had two plays performed at court. Ben Jonson was responsib
le for another. We don’t know if one of Shakespeare’s new plays was the fourth and last play staged at Richmond this Christmas. If one had been, the likeliest candidate was another comedy, As You Like It. Its extensive use of song and its country setting would have made it a good choice for a Christmas performance at rural Richmond, though in truth one of Shakespeare’s old plays could have been revived, or the Chamberlain’s Men might have staged any of the dozen or so lost plays written for them by other hands. But the raw political climate at year’s end was ill suited to Henry the Fifth and Julius Caesar, and Hamlet was not yet ready.

  Dekker, with his two plays at court, had every right to be proud. It had been a remarkable year for him, the most accomplished he would ever have. It had begun in prison, for he had been arrested in January at the behest of the Chamberlain’s Men (perhaps for failing to deliver on a play for which they had paid him). He was bailed out by the Admiral’s Men, and in the next twelve months Dekker wrote or collaborated on a staggering ten plays for them. The Admiral’s Men would be performing his popular comedy The Shoemaker’s Holiday on the evening of January 1, a play that rewrites Henry the Fifth as a rambunctious citizen comedy that glorifies not St. Crispian’s Day but Shrove Tuesday. Before that, on December 27, they would perform his Old Fortunatus, an old and popular rags-to-riches story that Dekker updated. He had been hard at work on Fortunatus two weeks before Christmas, adding material for the royal performance. It now began with a special prologue, spoken by two old men on their way to court—“the temple of Eliza”—who look out at the audience and discover Elizabeth herself in the throng:

  Our eyes are dazzled by Eliza’s beams,

  See (if at least thou dare see) where she sits:

  This is the great pantheon of our goddess,

  And all those faces which thine eyes thought stars,

  Are nymphs attending on her deity.

  The performance at court ended as it began, though with Dekker going even further than others had in celebrating the cult of Elizabeth: in a specially written epilogue, the actors call for everyone present to kneel before the “goddess” Elizabeth.

  Ben Jonson, too, had begun the year in fairly desperate straits. It had been a little over a year since he had been convicted of manslaughter and stripped of his worldly goods. After his release from prison, Jonson had recovered his fortunes by writing collaboratively with Dekker and others for the Admiral’s Men. By autumn, he had built on that success with the innovative Every Man Out of His Humour. The year was ending in triumph for Jonson, for his play was chosen to be performed by the Chamberlain’s Men before the queen. For Jonson’s career, no less than for Shakespeare’s, 1599 had been pivotal.

  Like Dekker, Jonson wrote a special conclusion for the performance at court. He didn’t have much choice. In the version first staged at the Globe, Every Man Out of His Humour had ended with a boy actor dressed up as Queen Elizabeth, the sight of whom miraculously converts the envious humor-stricken hero of the play, Macilente (the stage direction reads: “The very wonder of her presence strikes Macilente to the earth, dumb and astonished”). A boy impersonating Elizabeth might be seen as parodic or disrespectful. Even Jonson had to admit that “many seemed not to relish it,” and he was forced to change the ending at the Globe. The possibility of a court performance now offered a third and more fitting way to end the play: Macilente would be transformed by the actual sight of a curative Elizabeth, sitting in the audience. The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Old Fortunatus, and Every Man Out of His Humor were all rushed into print. Watching their plays performed at court this season, Dekker and Jonson can each be forgiven for imagining himself on the verge of overtaking Shakespeare as the most popular and admired dramatist of the age. For contemporary playwrights, Shakespeare’s work had become the mark to aim at and virtually all of Shakespeare’s rivals found themselves either imitating his example, repudiating it, or both. In recent months, direct competition with his plays had, if anything, intensified.

  Even as his rivals turned to history and romantic comedy, Shakespeare, having virtually exhausted his interest in these genres, had already moved on. One wouldn’t know it, however, from what was available in London’s bookstalls. For those purchasing plays in the coming year—in which The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing were all published for the first time—Shakespeare, whose name was at last regularly appearing on the title pages of his plays, remained the celebrated author of English history and romantic comedy. Neither Julius Caesar nor As You Like It, both of which were daringly original, would be published for decades. And it’s not at all clear whether many contemporaries yet saw in Brutus or Rosalind intimations of a depth and complexity in both language and character until now unavailable (with the exception of Falstaff) even in Shakespearean drama. Once again there was a lag between reputation and accomplishment. For many admirers Shakespeare was still, and would always be, the “honey-tongued” love poet. Only Shakespeare knew at Richmond this Christmas what others couldn’t: he had pushed himself to another creative level this past year and had finished drafting Hamlet, a play that was better than anything he had ever written. Through the soliloquy and its internalization of conflict, he had at last found his own way forward.

  When Shakespeare was at his most creative he wrote plays in bunches, and when he did so they tended to spill into one another. Though he probably wrote them consecutively, the four plays he had worked on in 1599 overlapped a great deal in his imagination, and the technical innovations in one had led to advances in the next. The year that began with Henry the Fifth invoking the “senators of th’ antique Rome” (5.0.26) ended in Hamlet with Horatio still hearkening back to the time “a little ere the mightiest Julius fell” (1.1.113). That Shakespeare was already thinking ahead to the forest of Arden is evident in Antony’s extended metaphor in his funeral oration in Julius Caesar: “Pardon me, Julius! Here wast thou bayed, brave hart, / Here didst thou fall, and here thy hunters stand, Signed, in thy spoil, and crimsoned in thy lethe…. How like a deer, strucken by many princes, Dost thou here lie” (3.1.204–10). And yet when Shakespeare turned to As You Like It, he couldn’t quite forget his recent Roman tragedy. Rosalind can casually remark that “there was never anything so sudden but the fight of two rams, and Caesar’s thrasonical brag of ‘I came, I saw, I overcame’ ” (5.2.24). When a deer is fatally wounded, it’s as if Jaques had recently seen Julius Caesar, for he accuses the deer hunters of acting like “mere usurpers, tyrants” (2.1.61–62) and later suggests that the deer slayer should be presented “to the Duke like a Roman conqueror” (4.2.3–5). The melancholy Jaques is a forerunner of Hamlet, though one who had the misfortune to be put by Shakespeare into a pastoral comedy, where his aloofness and cynicism are mocked rather than rewarded with tragic greatness. With Hamlet, the cross-pollination of the plays reaches another level when Polonius unexpectedly tells Hamlet, “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’ th’ Capitol; Brutus killed me” (3.2.99). John Heminges, who played older men, probably spoke these lines and also played Caesar. The in-joke, which audiences at the Globe would have shared, is that Richard Burbage, who was playing Hamlet and had played Brutus, was about to stab Heminges again.

  The Globe had proven to be critical to Shakespeare’s artistic breakthrough. He was the first modern dramatist to develop such an intimate connection to a particular playing space and audience. Had plans to remove the timbers of the Theatre and transport them across the river fallen through, the history of English literature would have looked very different. Until the building of the Globe, playgoers could expect to find more or less the same kinds of drama performed at one public theater as they could at another. No longer. With the completion of the Globe and the concurrent rise of the boy players, the branding of theaters had begun in earnest, as individual playhouses were increasingly identified with particular kinds of offerings. Having dispensed with raucous jigs and improvisational clowning, the Chamber
lain’s Men succeed this year in positioning themselves somewhere between the popular offering of rival adult companies and the more elite offerings of the boys. They could do so only because of the breadth of Shakespeare’s appeal, his ability to write plays that were intellectually rigorous and yet pleased all.

  Philip Henslowe had been in the business long enough to know that the players at his aging Rose could not survive such competition—indeed, he may have been shopping around for a site for a new theater in the northern suburbs for some time, and his inquiries may have helped propel the move to the Bankside by the Chamberlain’s Men rather than the other way around. On December 24, 1599, a lease was taken out on a property on Golding Lane, beyond Cripplegate: it would be the home of the Admiral’s Men’s new theater, the Fortune. Two days after Christmas performances at court ended, Peter Street, having finished work on the Globe, was hired to build the new theater. Physically, the Fortune would resemble the Globe in all respects, except that its exterior frame would be square, not round. Henslowe, who also recognized that his resident company needed to be defined by a house style, decided to appeal to nostalgia, satisfying audiences who preferred the hits of the past. Jigs at the Fortune became so popular that a decade later the authorities had to put a stop to them, for “by reason of certain lewd jigs, songs, and dances… lewd and ill-disposed persons in great multitude do resort thither at the end of every play.” Henslowe also coaxed out of retirement his son-in-law, the tragedian Edward Alleyn, who a decade earlier had made his reputation playing Marlowe’s great overreachers. If the Globe would parody Marlowe and reject jigs, the Fortune would revive both.