A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  For criticism on Julius Caesar to which I’m especially indebted, see Mark Rose, “Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599,” in True and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana, 1992), 256–69; Naomi Conn Liebler, “‘Thou Bleeding Piece of Earth’: The Ritual Ground of Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981), 175–96; J. Dover Wilson, “Ben Jonson and Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Survey 2 (1949), 36–43; Wayne Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990), 78–109, David Kaula, “‘Let Us Be Sacrificers’: Religious Motifs in Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981), 197–214; and Ian Donaldson, “‘Miscontruing Everything’: Julius Caesar and Sejanus,” in Shakespeare Performed, ed. Grace Ioppolo, 88–107. Richard Wilson has done important work on the play in his “A Brute Part: Julius Caesar and the Rites of Violence,” Cahiers Elisabethains 50 (1996), 19–32; Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Detroit, 1993); Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, Penguin Critical Studies (London, 1992); and the introduction to his edition of Julius Caesar. New Casebooks (New York, 2002). For the play in performance, see John Ripley, Julius Caesar on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge, 1980).

  SUMMER

  9. The Invisible Armada

  I’ve reconstructed the story of the “Invisible Armada” from various State Papers (The Acts of the Privy Council are lost for this period). The phrase itself is found in Francis Bacon’s annotations to Camden’s Annals, found in vol. 6 of The Works Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. An invaluable source has been British Library Harl. MS. 168, which documents how “upon advertisement and intelligence that the King of Spain made great preparations both of ships and galleys and of great forces to employ the same against this her Majesty’s kingdom, there were diverse orders, letters, and directions given for putting the forces of the realm in readiness, and for other necessary preparations, for defense of the same, which are entered hereafter in this book, viz., 1599.” I’ve also drawn on J. H. Leslie, ed., “A Survey, Or Muster, of the Armed and Trayned Companies in London, 1588 and 1599,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 4 (1925), 62–71. See, too, Wernham, The Return of the Armadas; Julian S. Corbett, The Successors of Drake (London, 1900); and Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia. There has been little treatment of its impact upon the stage, though see Charles W. Crupi, “Ideological Contradictions in Part 1 of Heywood’s Edward IV: ‘Our Musicke Runs… Much upon Discords,’ ” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7 (1995), 224–56. For the smuggled Spanish proclamation, see Bibliotheca Lindesiana, A Bibliography of Royal Proclamations of the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns vol. 1 (Oxford, 1910). On the lost play of Turnhout, in addition to Whyte’s letters (in H. M. C. L’Isle and Dudley), see Millicent V. Hay, The Life of Robert Sidney (Washington, D.C., 1984); and A True Discourse of the Overthrow Given to the Common Enemy at Turnhaut (London, 1597).

  10. The Passionate Pilgrim

  For the history of the text of The Passionate Pilgrim I’ve relied on Joseph Quincy Adams’s facsimile edition of the 1599 edition (New York, 1939) as well as Colin Burrow’s discussion in his Oxford edition. There is an outside possibility that the first edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, for which the title page is missing, came out in late 1598, when Jaggard first set up shop. See, too, C. H. Hobday, “Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis Sonnets,” Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973), 103–9; and Arthur F. Marotti, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisaman Maus (Chicago, 1990), 143–73. On the poems lifted from Love’s Labour’s Lost, see William C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (Princeton, 1976). And on Shakespeare’s poetry in relation to his life, see Colin Burrow, “Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems,” Proceedings of the British Academy 97 (1998), 15–50.

  On Shakespeare’s encounter with George Buc, see Alan H. Nelson, “George Buc, William Shakespeare, and the Folger George a Greene,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998), 74–83; and Mark Eccles “Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels,” in Sir Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, ed. C. J. Sisson (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 409–506. For more on Buc’s books (including Drummond’s and Harrington’s collections) see Alan Nelson’s website: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/BUC/quartos.html. See as well F. J. Furnivall, “Sir John Harington’s Shakespeare Quartos,” Notes and Queries 7th series, 9 (1890), 382–83. On London’s bookshops, see the remarkable reconstruction offered by Peter W. M. Blayney, The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard, Occasional Papers of the Bibliographic Society, Number 5 (London, 1990).

  11. Simple Truth Suppressed

  Additional support for the view that Shakespeare revised “When My Love Swears” is the survival of an earlier version of the poem in Folger MS. V.a. 339, fol. 197v, transcribed around 1630 to 1640, which corresponds closely to the Passionate Pilgrim version. On the dating of the sonnets, see A. Kent Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake Prescott, “When did Shakespeare Write Sonnets 1609?,” Studies in Philology 88 (1991), 69–109; and Macd. P. Jackson, “Vocabulary and Chronology: The Case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Review of English Studies 52 (2001), 59–75. I am deeply indebted to Edward A. Snow, “Loves of Comfort and Despair: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138,” English Literary History 47 (1980), 462–83. For the best introduction to Lodge’s story, see Donald Beecher, ed., Rosalind (Ottowa, 1997). Frank Kermode’s remarks can be found in Shakespeare’s Language (New York, 2000). For Shakespeare and Marlowe, see James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York, 1991).

  For Robert Armin’s career and writings, see his Collected Works, ed. J.P. Feather (New York, 1972); Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown; Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2003); A. K. Gray, “Robert Armine, the Foole,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 42 (1927), 673–85; and C. S. Felver, Robert Armin, Shakespeare’s Fool (Kent, Ohio, 1961).

  On Shakespeare’s songs and his collaboration with Morley, see: Thomas Morley, The First Booke of Ayres or Little Short Songs, to Sing and Play to the Lute, with the Base Viole (London, 1600); Ernest Brennecke Jr., “Shakespeare’s Musical Collaboration with Morley,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 54 (1939), 139–52; Peter J. Seng, The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare: A Critical History (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); F. W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1963); and Ross W. Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York, 2004). And on the jig and the dance, see Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Heights, N. J., 1981).

  My thinking about As You Like It has been strongly influenced by Marjorie Garber, “The Education of Orlando,” in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman (Newark, 1986), 102–112; M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare the Craftsman (London, 1969); Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York, 1992); Penny Gay, William Shakespeare: As You Like It (Plymouth, 1999); and Louis A. Montrose’s essays on the social dynamics of the play: “ ‘The Place of a Brother’: As You Like It and Social Change,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981), 28–54; and “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form,” English Literary History 10 (1983), 415–59. Harold Bloom’s account of the character of Rosalind in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York, 1998) is well worth reading. On the mock-wedding scene, see Ann Jennalie Cook, Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society (Princeton, 1991). And for the sign of the Globe, see Richard Dutton, “Hamlet, An Apology for Actors, and the Sign of the Globe,” Shakespeare Survey 41 (1988), 35–37.

  12. The Forest of Arden

  For Shakespeare’s family, in addition to Chambers, Facts and Problems and the st
andard biographies, see Charles Isaac Elton, William Shakespeare: His Family and Friends, ed. A. Hamilton Thomson (New York, 1904); Joseph William Gray, Shakespeare’s Marriage (London, 1905); Ivor Brown, The Women in Shakespeare’s Life (New York, 1969); and Joseph William Gray, Shakespeare’s Marriage (London, 1905). For the mustering of his (step) brother-in-law John Hathaway in 1599, see Warwickshire Country Record Office, CR1886/2657.

  For knowledge of the Stratford carrier Richard Greenaway, of whom I was ignorant, I am indebted to Prof. Stanley Wells. See, in addition to letters in Fripp’s Quyny, Stratford Record Office BRU 15/1 (129), and S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford, 1970). For land travel in Shakespeare’s England and the route from London to Stratford, see Charles Hughes, “Land Travel,” in Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life and Manners of His Age, ed. Sidney Lee and C. T. Onions, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1916); Joan Parkes, Travel in England in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1925); John W. Hales, “From Stratford to London,” in Notes and Essays on Shakespeare (London, 1884), first published in Cornhill Magazine (June 1877); and the itinerary offered in Russell Fraser, Young Shakespeare (New York, 1988).

  For conditions within Shakespeare’s Stratford, see in addition to Fripp’s work, J. M. Martin, “A Warwickshire Market Town in Adversity: Stratford-Upon-Avon in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Midland History 7 (1982), 26–41; S. Porter, “Fires in Stratford-upon-Avon in the Sixteenth and Seventeeth Centuries,” Warwickshire History 3 (1276), 97–103; Robert Bearman, “Stratford’s Fires of 1594 and 1595 Revisited,” Midland History 25 (2000), 180–90; Anne Hughes, “Building a Godly Town: Religious and Cultural Division in Stratford-upon-Avon, 1560–1640,” and Alan Dyer, “Crisis and Resolution: Government and Society in Stratford, 1540–1640,” both of which appear in Bearman, ed., The History of an English Borough. On the broader economic conditions of England in the late 1590s, see R. B. Outhwaite’s two essays: “Dearth, the English Crown and the ‘Crisis of the 1590s,’” in The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History, ed. Peter Clark (London, 1985), 23–43, and “The Price of Crown Land at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 20 (1967), 229–40.

  For social and economic conditions in the Forest of Arden in medieval and early modern England, see Andrew Watkins, “The Woodland Economy of the Forest of Arden in the Later Middle Ages,” Midland History 18 (1993), 19–36; and Victor H. T. Skipp’s influential work: Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case of the Forest of Arden (Cambridge, 1978); “Forest of Arden, 1530–1649,” Agricultural History Review 18 (1970), 84–111; and “Economic and Social Change in the Forest of Arden, 1530–1649,” in Land, Church and People: Essays Presented to Professor H. P. R. Finberg, ed. Joan Thirsk (Reading, 1970); Brian Short, “Forests and Wood-Pasture in Lowland England,” in The English Rural Landscape, ed. Joan Thirsk (Oxford, 2000), 122–49; Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 1996); Edward Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge, 2001); and W. Salt Brassington, Shakespeare’s Homeland: Sketches of Stratford-upon-Avon, the Forest of Arden and the Avon Valley (London, 1903). See, too, William Harrison, Description of England (London, 1577).

  A. Stuart Daley has produced a group of essays that have illuminated the social and political realities of As You Like It: “Where are the Woods in As You Like It?,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983), 172–80; “The Dispraise of the Country in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985), 300–14; “The Idea of Hunting in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Studies 21 (1993), 72–95; “Calling and Commonwealth in As You Like It: A Late Elizabethan Political Play,” The Upstart Crow 14 (1994), 28–46; “Observations on the Natural Settings and Flora of the Ardens of Lodge and Shakespeare,” English Language Notes 22 (1985), 20–29; “Shakespeare’s Corin, Almsgiver and Faithful Feeder,” English Language Notes 27 (1990), 4–21; and “The Tyrant Duke of As You Like It: Envious Malice Confronts Honor, Pity, Friendship,” Cahiers Elisabethains 34 (1988), 39–51. See, too, Richard Wilson, Will Power; Meredith Skura, “Anthony Munday’s ‘Gentrification’ of Robin Hood,” English Literary Renaissance 33 (2003), 155–80; and Madeleine Doran, “‘Yet I am inland bred’” in James G. McManaway, ed., Shakespeare 400 (New York, 1964), 99–114. And see Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, in Works, ed. J. William Hebel, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1933).

  For Shakespeare’s dealing with the College of Arms in 1599, see C.W. Scott-Giles, Shakespeare’s Heraldry; Chambers, Facts and Problems; and Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare. And for the Arden legacy, see Eric Poole, “John and Mary Shakespeare and the Astow Cantlow Mortgage,” Cahiers Elisabethains 17 (1980), 21–42.

  AUTUMN

  13. Things Dying, Things Newborn

  I’ve reconstructed Essex’s campaign in Ireland from State Papers, English and Irish; Cyril Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars; C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army; L. W. Henry, “Contemporary Sources for Essex’s Lieutenancy in Ireland, 1599”; Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion; G. A. Hayes-McCoy, “The Army of Ulster, 1593–1601,” in The Irish Sword; E. M. Tenison, Elizabethan England; Harington’s Nugae Antiquae; Paul E. J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, and his “The Use of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, c. 1585–1601,” The English Historical Review 109 (1994), 26–51. For Essex’s words before the College of Arms, see William Huse Dunham Jr., “William Camden’s Commonplace Book,” Yale University Library Gazette 43 (1969), 139–56; for the ballad celebrating St. George’s Day in Ireland, see Andrew Clark, ed., The Shirburn Ballads; and for Essex’s letter to Knollys, see Sir William Sanderson, Aulicus Coquinariae (London, 1650).

  On John Harington, in addition to his Nugae Antiquae see: R. H. Miller, “Sir John Harington’s Irish Journals,” Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979), 179–86; and David M. Gardiner, “‘These are Not the Thinges Men Live by Now a Days’: Sir John Harington’s Visit to the O’Neill, 1599,” Cahiers Elisabethains 55 (April 1999), 1–16. For details about Queen Elizabeth’s bed, see Roy Strong and Julia Trevelyan Oman, Elizabeth R (London, 1971).

  On the formation and influence of the East India Company, see: K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company (London, 1965); Henry Stevens, The Dawn of British Trade to the East Indies (London, 1886); Sir William Foster, England’s Quest of Eastern Trade (London, 1933); John Bruce, Annals of the Honourable East India Company, vol. 1 (London, 1810); and Beckles Willson, Ledger and Sword: Or, The Honourable Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies (1599-1874), 2 vols. (London, 1903). See, too: M. Epstein, The Early History of the Levant Company (London, 1908); Nicholas Canny and Alaine Low, eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire: 1. The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1998); Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge, 1984); G. L. Beer, The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578–1660 (New York, 1922); and Anthony Farrington, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia, 1600–1834 (London, 2002).

  On Hakluyt’s efforts, see George Bruner Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (New York, 1928); and Hakluyt’s own Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 3 vols. (London, 1598–1600). On the participation of the nobility in joint-stock trading companies, see Lawrence Stone, “The Nobility in Business,” in The Entrepreneur: Papers Presented at the Annual Conference of the Economic History Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 14–21; and Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). I’ve also drawn on Michael G. Brennan, “The Literature of Travel,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol 4: 1557–1695, ed. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (Cambridge, 2002), 246–73; William Foster, ed., The Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant, 1584–1602 (London, 1931); and Sir William Foster, ed., The Voyages
of Sir James Lancaster to Brazil and the East Indies, 1591–1603 (London, 1940). Keeling’s account of performances of Hamlet at sea can be found in Thomas Rundall, ed., Narratives of Voyages Towards the North-West…With Selections from the Early Records of the Honourable The East India Company (London, 1849).

  On contemporary reflections on the decline of chivalric culture, see George Silver, Paradoxes of Defence (London, 1599), and William Segar, Honor, Military and Civill (London, 1602). For modern studies, see Mervyn James’s important essays on “English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642,” and “At the Crossroads of the Political Culture: The Essex Revolt, 1601,” in his Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), 270–415 and 416–66. I’m also indebted to Richard C. McCoy’s The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley, 1989) as well as his earlier essay, “A Dangerous Image”: the Earl of Essex and Elizabethan Chivalry,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1983), 313–29. See, too, R. A. Foakes’s forthcoming article on the Ghost’s armor in Hamlet.