by Shakespeare
CHAPTER 54
And to Be Short, What Not,
That’s Sweete and Happie
James Burbage had died at the end of January 1597, and was buried in the little church of Shoreditch in the presence of his family and of the players. It has been assumed by some that he expired from disappointment or depression at the failure of his scheme to convert the Black-friars refectory into a playhouse, but he was probably too tough and experienced a manager to succumb to local difficulties. He was in any case past his mid-sixties, and in sixteenth-century terms had reached an advanced age. He left everything to his two sons who had continued in their father’s theatrical business. He gave the Theatre to Cuthbert Burbage, company sharer but not an actor, and the Blackfriars property to Richard Burbage, actor and company sharer; both properties may have seemed to his sons at the time to be the theatrical equivalent of the poisoned chalice, especially since Cuthbert was still not able to reach a satisfactory agreement with the landlord of the Theatre. The ground lease was set to expire in April 1597; Giles Allen agreed to an extension of the lease, but then objected to Richard Burbage as one of its guarantors. So it seems that in the late spring and early summer of 1597 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at the Curtain, while dispute continued over the now deserted Theatre. It was at the Curtain that the two completed parts of Henry IV were played.
Shakespeare had in fact stopped work upon the second part of Henry IV in order to concentrate upon The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is generally supposed that this latest comedy was written for the Garter Feast celebrated at Whitehall on 23 April 1597. Specifically it was a feast held in honour of the election of George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, as Knight of the Garter; he had just been appointed Lord Chamberlain after the death of Lord Cobham and had become the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The actors’ winter under Cobham’s rule had turned to glorious summer with the son of their former patron and supporter. The first Lord Hunsdon had been a welcome patron, and it seemed likely that his son would carry on that honourable tradition. It is reported that the queen asked for a drama about Falstaff in love, as we have already observed, and it is further reported that Shakespeare wrote the play in two weeks. Lord Hunsdon doubtless relayed the royal request, and Shakespeare immediately set to work. It is clear enough, given the number of their performances at court, that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were singled out for royal attention. Shakespeare may not have been court poet, but he was certainly favourite dramatist.
The Merry Wives of Windsor was set in Windsor simply because the new knights were ceremonially installed at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. There is no indication of any full-length drama being presented at such Garter celebrations, but the masque at the end of the play in which Mistress Quickly, absurdly disguised as the Fairy Queen, trips a measure, might have been perfomed at the castle rather than at the feast in Westminster Palace. A fortnight seems a reasonable time for its composition, together with other incidental stories or pieces of dialogue. Shakespeare then subsequently wrote the rest of the play to lead to this celebratory climax.
The characters of Falstaff and Shallow, Pistol and Bardolph, were just too good to relinquish; by dint of popular applause they came back. In the first printed edition the principal attraction is made clear in the description of “an excellent and pleasant conceited commedie of Sir John Faulstof and the merry wyves of Windesor.” Shakespeare may also have included material that he was unable to use in the history plays themselves. He was thrifty in such matters. He also added a contemporary note. One of the exasperated husbands in the play, concerned about his wife’s possible adultery with Falstaff, takes on the assumed name of “Brooke.” It seems to be a clear if harmless hit against the Brooke family whose paterfamilias, Lord Cobham, had recently died. Yet it may also be a hit against Sir Ralph Brooke, the York Herald who was disputing the Shakespeares’ right to bear arms. Whatever the truth of the matter Shakespeare was obliged by the Master of the Revels to turn “Brooke” into “Broome.” The joke is in any case lost upon posterity. There were other jokes, one about a German count who had been made a knight in absentia, suggesting that Shakespeare still had an eye for contemporaneous affairs.
The fact that the drama flowed so fluently from his pen suggests that it was an emanation from his natural wit – which means, in turn, that it can be interpreted as a traditional English comedy. Here are all the ingredients of English humour – a continual bawdiness of intention, a salacious narrative, and a man farcically dressed in “drag” as Falstaff escapes detection by posing as the fat woman of Brentford. There is also a comic Frenchman and, in true native style, a sudden turn towards supernaturalism at the end. More importantly, perhaps, sexual desire is continually transformed into farce. It is the stuff of a thousand English comedies, and in this place the sexual innuendo and the blue joke find their locus classicus. Others have noticed how in the play the English language is twisted and turned in a hundred different ways, in the mouths of a Frenchman and a Welshman, but this is only another aspect of the variability and variety of Shakespeare’s style when he is writing at the height of his invention. Words themselves become farcical in a world where improbability and incongruity are the only standards. In one sense The Merry Wives of Windsor resembles the “citizens’ plays” that had become very popular, but it is governed by a more genial spirit. By setting it in a country town, outside London, Shakespeare avoids the kind of urban satire that Jonson and Dekker employed.
The comedy would have been a gift to his players, too, with the emphasis on mistaken identities and sudden changes of plot. If Kempe continued to play Falstaff, he would have proved a singular “hit” dressed up as the fat woman of Brentford; the spare Sinklo would have played Slender. It has often been supposed that Shakespeare borrowed his comic plots from Italian drama, but in the crossing they have suffered a sea-change. It is characteristic of the English imagination, of which he is the greatest exemplar, to incorporate and to alter foreign models.
Part VI. New place
Shakespearye Player: rough sketch for the proposed coat-of-arms.
CHAPTER 55
Therefore Am I
of an Honourable House
In the early days of May 1597, Shakespeare purchased one of the largest houses in Stratford. It was called New Place and had been erected at the end of the fifteenth century by the most celebrated former resident of the town, Sir Hugh Clopton. Its ownership set the seal on Shakespeare’s standing in the place of his birth. Its frontage was some 60 feet, its depth some 70 feet, and it reached a height of 28 feet. Shakespeare’s new house was made of brick upon a stone foundation, gabled, and with bay windows on the eastern or garden side. The topographer, John Leland, had called it a “pretty house of brick and timber,”1 and to the people of Stratford it was known as the “Great House.” As a boy Shakespeare had passed it every day, on his way to school, and it impressed itself on his imagination as a most desirable residence. It represented his childhood dream of prosperity. It was exactly the same spirit that persuaded Charles Dickens to buy Gad’s Hill Place in Kent; that house was for him, too, the measure of his childhood longing for success and notability. “If you work hard,” John Dickens had told his son, “you may one day own such a house.” These were perhaps also the words of John Shakespeare.
It was on the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane, a commodious residence with its servants’ quarters at the front looking over Chapel Street; behind these was an enclosed courtyard and the main house. It was a prosperous, but not necessarily a quiet, neighbourhood. Chapel Street had many good houses, but Chapel Lane was squalid and malodorous; there were pigsties and common dunghills there, together with mud-walls and thatched barns. New Place itself stood immediately opposite the Falcon hostelry, and the local cheese market took place just outside the front door. Further down the street, on the other side of the lane, was the guild chapel and schoolroom where he had spent his early years. He had come back to the very site of his childhood.
He purchased the house and grounds for “sixty pounds in silver,” representing the first large investment he had ever made. In this he differed from his theatrical colleagues who tended to make their first investments in London property for themselves and their families. It is an indication that Shakespeare still readily and naturally identified himself with his native town; in London he remained, to use a Greek term, a resident alien. It may be doubted, however, whether he was really at home anywhere.
The deeds mention this sum of £60 but the complication of Elizabethan property negotiations is such that the actual cost was probably twice as much. Before Shakespeare bought it, however, the property had been described as “in great ruin and decay, and unrepaired, and it doth still remain unrepaired.” It was going cheap, in other words, and Shakespeare saw a likely opportunity for investment. According to a Clopton descendant Shakespeare “repair’d and modell’d it to his own mind.”2 He ordered stone to fulfil his vision. The building work must have been extensive, therefore, and almost instinctively found its way into the play he was writing at the time. In the second part of Henry IV there are three references to the building of a house, with its plots and models and costs.
It comprised at least ten rooms (there were ten fireplaces that were taxed at a later date), with two gardens and two barns; a later reference to two orchards may mean that Shakespeare and his family converted part of the gardens to more practical use. A similar if less spacious house, two doors away from Shakespeare’s dwelling, contained a hall, a parlour bedchamber, a “great chamber” and two other chambers beside a kitchen and cellar. Was there also in New Place a study, or perhaps even a library, for the master of the house? On this, of course, the public records are silent. But if Shakespeare now returned more often to Stratford, as some people surmise, then he would have required a place to read and to write.
He enlarged the garden by buying additional land and by demolishing a cottage. There were two ancient wells here, which can still be seen on the now empty site. Shakespeare was at ease in these surroundings, on his frequent or infrequent returns to Stratford. It is very likely that he owned a copy of John Gerard’s The Herball or generall historie of plantes, which was published in the year he purchased New Place. In that compendium of garden lore there is a reference to a blue-petalled speedwell that the Welsh called “fluellen.” Fluellen was the name he gave to the Welsh captain in Henry V. He is also supposed to have planted a mulberry tree in the garden, from which in later years an inexhaustible supply of wood was provided to cater for “tourist” items such as paperweights and walking sticks. If he did indeed plant a mulberry tree, he would have done so twelve years after the purchase of the house; in 1609 a Frenchman named Verton distributed young mulberry plants through the midland counties at the request of James I. There were also fruitful grape-vines here. A few years after Shakespeare’s death a local dignitary asked to be given from New Place “2 or 3 of the fairest of those budes on some few shutes of the last yeares vines.”
The two barns were used to store corn and barley although, in these years of harvest failures and short supplies, Shakespeare might be deemed guilty of hoarding such materials. The year of his house purchase was the fourth year of bad harvests, and the grain shortage was such that its price had risen fourfold. Shakespeare was always an astute businessman. Some historians have described him as one of the first “venture capitalists” in an emerging “market economy,” ready to trade in cash or credit, but this is perhaps too theoretical an interpretation for what must have been for him a sensible speculation. A few months after his purchase of New Place he was recorded as hoarding 10 quarters, or 80 bushels, of malt; this was no doubt used for the purposes of brewing by Mrs. Shakespeare or her daughters, but it provoked censure.
There is a curious story concerning the Underhills, a family of Catholic recusants from whom Shakespeare bought the house. William Underhill was a devoted Catholic who was often fined and “presented” for recusancy. He seems to have been forced to sell New Place as a result of debt, which again is testimony to Shakespeare’s business acumen rather than to any religious sympathy on his part. Two months after relinquishing New Place, Underhill died in mysterious circumstances; it transpired that he had been poisoned by his son and heir, Fulke Underhill, who was later executed for the crime. By strange chance a former owner of New Place, William Bott, was accused of murdering his daughter by poison on the premises; he gave her ratsbane, according to a witness, and she “swelled to death.”3 It can be surmised that Shakespeare was not superstitious about the possibility of unlucky or unhappy houses.
That house itself has long gone, having been levelled to the ground by a subsequent owner who was tired of unannounced visitors coming to his door and asking to view the surroundings of the late dramatist. But there survives one description from a small boy of Stratford in the late seventeenth century; he recalled “a small kind of Green Court before they entered the House … fronted with brick, with plain windows, Consisting of common panes of Glass set in lead, as at this time.”4 There are also some early eighteenth-century sketches, the work of George Vertue, who seems to be relying on the testimony of the descendants of Shakespeare’s sister. The principal drawing does indeed show a dwelling that might easily be described as the “Great House.” Certainly it was grand enough for Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, to keep her court here for three weeks in the summer of 1643. We might see it at this time, and no doubt before, as a stronghold for monarchists. It should be recalled that Shakespeare was only thirty-three years old when he became the owner of this substantial property. His advance had been rapid indeed. New Place should be seen, then, in connection with the grant of arms to Shakespeare’s family. It was a way of demonstrating the dramatist’s gentility to his neighbours. It banished the normal associations surrounding a London player, and confirmed his status as one of the richest of Stratford’s inhabitants.
CHAPTER 56
Pirates May Make Cheape Penyworths of Their Pillage
In the summer of this year, a theatrical scandal threatened to take away the livelihood of all players. In July 1597, the Earl of Pembroke’s Men performed a satirical play entitled The Isle of Dogs at the Swan in Paris Garden. It lampooned various members of the administration and thus elicited the wrath of the authorities. It was considered to be a “lewd plaie” stuffed with “seditious and sclanderous matter.”1 One of the authors, and certain of the players, were arrested and imprisoned for three months. The part-author was in fact the young Ben Jonson; he had also acted in the production, and was promptly despatched to the Marshalsea. Jonson was twenty-five at the time, and The Isle of Dogs was the first play he had written or had helped to write; his was certainly a fiery baptism. He later recalled “the tyme of his close imprisonment” when “his judges could gett nothing of him to all their demands but I and No.”2 It is difficult to imagine Shakespeare in such unpleasant circumstances, but he would not have dreamed of writing anything remotely seditious or slanderous. He was not a rebel or incendiary; he was firmly within the boundaries of the Elizabethan polity.
The Privy Council then demanded that “no plaies shalbe used within London … during this tyme of sommer” and furthermore that “those playhouses that are erected and built only for suche purposes shal be plucked downe.” 3 It was one of those announcements that flew in the face of all urban realities – equivalent to the proclamations demanding a halt in the growth of the city itself – and was never properly enforced. Tudor edicts sometimes give the impression of being rhetorical gestures rather than legal requirements. It is possible that the declaration was aimed at the Swan since it demanded the destruction of those playhouses that were erected “only” for the performance of plays. Henslowe at the Rose, for example, might argue that his venue was also used for other forms of entertainment; in any case he continued as if nothing untoward had happened. The justices of Middlesex and Surrey specifically ordered the owners of the Curtain Theatre “to pluck downe quite the stages, ga
llories and roomes” but again the order was not obeyed. If the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were still playing here, as seems likely, they could shelter in the shadow of their great patron.
They did, however, decide to go on tour. In August they went down to the fishing port of Rye, built on a sandstone hill, and then journeyed to Dover; from there they moved on in September to Marlborough, Faversham, Bath and Bristol. There is every reason to believe that Shakespeare was with them on their travels.
The “inhibition” upon playing in London was lifted in October, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men returned to the Curtain. It may have been in this season that “Curtaine plaudeties”4 were heard for performances of Romeo and Juliet, which was one of three plays by Shakespeare published this year in volume form. They were three of his most popular dramas, and it is likely that they were all being performed in this period. Publication would then be a way of exploiting their success in a different market. In August The Tragedie of King Richard the Second appeared on the book stalls. It proved such a success that two further editions were published in the succeeding year. It was followed in October by The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. This play was reprinted four more times in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Then in the following month Romeo and Juliet appeared in volume form.
