Shakespeare
Page 57
The larger part of his bequest did indeed go to his older daughter, Susannah, and to her husband. They are nominated by Shakespeare as the ones to hold together his estate. He left the Halls “All the rest of my goods Chattels Leases plate Jewels amp; household stuffe whatsoever.” The “leases” may have included his shares in the Globe and in Blackfriars, if he still in fact retained them. He left his daughter New Place and the two houses in Henley Street as well as the gatehouse in Blackfriars; in addition Shakespeare bequeathed her all the lands that he had gradually purchased over the last few years. The bequest was to be held entire and in turn left to the first male son of the Halls, or to the son of the second son, going down through the generations of males in the putative Shakespearian genealogy. His patriarchal instincts were clear, even though nature thwarted his intentions.
There were other gifts to relatives and to neighbours, as well as the price of three gold rings for three of his colleagues from the King’s Men – Richard Burbage, John Heminges and Henry Condell. Since Heminges and Condell were the begetters of the subsequent Folio edition of his plays, the rings can be considered to be a “forget not” token. It makes it more, rather than less, likely that in Stratford he had been revising his plays for future publication.
He left £10 for the relief of the poor of Stratford, by no means an extravagant sum, and his processional sword to Thomas Combe. It has been considered odd or singular that Shakespeare mentions no books or play-manuscripts in this will, but they may have been included in the “goods” generally inherited by the Halls. They could also have formed part of an inventory that is now lost. In his own will, at a later date, John Hall refers to his “study of Bookes” which were entirely scattered to the winds. There was also a report that Shakespeare’s granddaughter (he had no male heirs) “carried away with her from Stratford many of her grand-father’s papers,”7 but this cannot now be verified.
It is a sensible and business-like document, evincing Shakespeare’s eminently practical temperament. It is true that other early seventeenth-century testators are more effusive in their allusions to family and friends, but they had not spent a lifetime writing plays. When one eighteenth-century antiquary complained that the will was “absolutely void of the least particle of that Spirit which Animated our Great Poet,”8 he forgot that he was dealing with a legal document rather than a work of art. The distinction would not have been lost on Shakespeare himself. He signed the first two sheets of the will “Shakspere,” and the final sheet was completed with the words “By me William Shakspeare.” The surname trails off, as if the hand could hardly hold or direct the pen. These were the last words he ever wrote.
Shakespeare lingered for four weeks from March into April; if he was indeed suffering from typhoid fever, the period is right. He would have experienced insomnia, fatigue and overwhelming thirst which no amount of liquid could reasonably assuage. It is reported from no very reliable source that “he caught his death through leaving his bed when ill, because some of his old friends had called on him.”9 We have had cause to note the belief that “he dyed a Papist,” which may mean that he was given extreme unction according to the old Catholic rite. As death approached, the passing bell was rung in the Stratford church. He died on 23 April and, having been born on the same day, he had just entered his fifty-third year.
He was embalmed and laid upon the bed, wrapped in flowers and herbs in the process known as “winding” the corpse. His friends and neighbours walked solemnly through New Place to view the body; the principal rooms and staircases were draped with black cloths. The corpse was then “watched” until interment. He was wrapped in a linen winding sheet and, two days later, carried down the well-worn “burying path” to the old church. It was sometimes the custom to accompany the burial procession with music. He was said to have been buried at a depth of some 17 feet; this seems a deep pit indeed but it may have been dug out of fear of contagion from the typhus. He was placed beneath the floor of the chancel, beside the north wall, as his status as lay rector and receiver of tithes required. It is likely to have been Shakespeare himself who wrote the epitaph:
GOOD FREND FOR IESVS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE!
BLEST BE YE MAN YT SPARES THES STONES,
AND CVRST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.
He gave the world his works, and his good fellowship, not his body or his name.
The mourners carried small bunches of rosemary or bay to throw into the grave which, to this day, is visited by thousands of admirers and pilgrims.
CHAPTER 91. To Heare the Story of Your Life
He died as he had lived, without much sign of the world’s attention. When Ben Jonson expired his funeral procession included “all of the nobility and gentry then in the town.”1 Only Shakespeare’s family and closest friends followed his bier to the grave. There were scant tributes paid to his memory by other dramatists, and the commendatory verses in the Folio of 1623 are slight indeed compared to the copious verse epistles on the deaths of Jonson, Fletcher and other fashionable playwrights. There were no books by Shakespeare in Jonson’s library. Shakespeare neither established nor encouraged any school of younger “disciples.”
It was only after half a century that the first biographical notices appeared, and no scholar or critic bothered to discuss Shakespeare with any of his friends or contemporaries. This may preface Emerson’s remark that “Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare.”2 He is one of those rare cases of a writer whose work is singularly important and influential, yet whose personality was not considered to be of any interest at all. He is obscure and elusive precisely to the extent that nobody bothered to write about him.
Yet the range of Shakespeare’s influence is not hard to discern. More than seventy issues and editions of his work appeared in his lifetime. By 1660 no fewer than nineteen of his plays had been published, and by 1680 there had been three editions of his collected plays. Theatrical reports suggest that, in hard times, the King’s Men supported themselves by replaying Shakespeare’s “old” dramas. Other playwrights, including Massinger and Middleton, Ford and Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, were drawn to imitate him. Othello and Romeo and Juliet were particularly influential among younger dramatists, and the figures of Hamlet and of Falstaff maintained their theatrical life and presence outside the plays in which they had originally appeared. Shakespeare also seems almost single-handedly to have maintained the status of the revenge tragedy and the romance. He was a hard writer to ignore.
On the occasion of the Shakespeare Jubilee, in the summer of 1769, a painting was hung before the windows of the room where the dramatist was supposed to have been born; it displayed the image of the sun breaking through clouds. It is a wonderful emblem of birth. But it also suggests revival and return. If at a later date that sun had shone through another window of the house in Henley Street its rays would have been refracted through a score of different names, where distinguished nineteenth-century visitors had scratched or scored their signatures upon the glass. Among them are Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, all of them registering the fact that they were shining within the light of Shakespeare himself.
The Folio or collected volume of his plays followed some seven years after his death. It was assembled by two of his fellows, John Heminges and Henry Condell, and was dedicated to the two Pembroke brothers. The Earl of Pembroke was Lord Chamberlain and the direct superior of the Master of the Revels. It served its purpose very well, and was for three centuries believed to represent the Shakespearian “canon” of thirty-six plays with the notable exclusion of certain collaborative ventures such as Pericles (later added) and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The fact that a list of the actors was added at the beginning suggests that this was as much a theatrical as a literary celebration. It may have been the subject of discussion among Shakespeare and his colleagues before his death, and it is even possible that some of the plays were printed from a revised transcri
pt by the playwright himself. Many of them, however, are in the hand of a professional scrivener named Ralph Crane who was often employed by the theatrical companies. The volume is adorned by the Droeshout engraving of the dramatist, which is indeed the only generally accepted likeness of William Shakespeare.
Acknowledgements
For ease of reference I have quoted line numbers from The Complete Works, Original-Spelling Edition, published by Oxford University Press (1986), easily the best modern edition of Shakespeare’s plays. I would also like to express my obligation and gratitude to its editors, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, for providing the closest possible transcription of Shakespeare’s printed words.
I would like to register a more private debt to my assistants, Thomas Wright and Murrough O’Brien, for their help in research and elucidation.
I would also like to thank Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jenny Overton for their invaluable suggestions and emendations and my editor, Penelope Hoare, for her patient work upon the typescript. All surviving errors are, of course, my own.
Notes
Chapter One
1 Quoted in David Cressy: Birth, Marriage and Death, page 81.
2 Jeanne Jones: Family Life in Shakespeare’s England, page 93.
3 Robert Bearman (ed.): The History of an English Borough, page 92.
Chapter Two
1 Richard Wilson: Will Power: Essays on Shakespearian Authority, page 71.
2 ibid.
3 ibid.
Chapter Four
1 Caroline Spurgeon: Shakespeare’s Imagery, page 93.
2 ibid., page 98.
3 Jeanne Jones: Family Life in Shakespeare’s England, page 22.
4 ibid, page 33.
5 Keith Wrightson: English Society 1580-1680, page 149.
Chapter Five
1 Quoted in E.K. Chambers: William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 247.
2 Quoted in Samuel Schoenbaum: Shakespeare’s Lives, page 5.
3 Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 19.
4 P. Hanks and F. Hodges: A Dictionary of Surnames, page 482.
5 Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 375.
6 Quoted in Samuel Schoenbaum: William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, page 27.
7 Wrightson: English Society, page 52.
8 Quoted in E.I. Fripp: Shakespeare’s Stratford, page 64.
9 Schoenbaum: Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, page 14.
Chapter Six
1 Quoted in Schoenbaum: Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, page 15.
2 Quoted in Nathan Drake: Shakespeare and His Times, page 99.
3 Quoted in Mark Eccles: Shakespeare in Warwickshire, page 17.
Chapter Seven
1 Quoted in Mark Eccles: Shakespeare in Warwickshire, page 39.
2 Heinrich Mutschmann and Karl Wentersdorf: Shakespeare and Catholicism, page 147.
3 Information in Fripp: Shakespeare’s Stratford, page 31.
4 Quoted in P. Collinson (ed.): “William Shakespeare’s Religious Inheritance and Environment,” in Elizabethan Essays, page 246.
5 Alexandra Walsham: Church Papists, page 78.
Chapter Nine
1 Quoted in Drake: Shakespeare and His Times, page 116.
2 Quoted in Wrightson: English Society, page 19.
3 Quoted in Schoenbaum: Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, page 36.
4 Quoted in E.I. Fripp: Shakespeare: Man and Artist, Volume One, page 74.
Chapter Ten
1 Quoted in Fripp: Shakespeare: Man and Artist, Volume One, page 65.
Chapter Eleven
1 Quoted in Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, pages 252-3.
2 John Palmer: Molière, His Life and Works (London, 1930), page 35.
Chapter Twelve
1 Quoted in Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 264.
2 Quoted in Fripp: Shakespeare: Man and Artist, Volume One, page 83.
3 Quoted in B.L. Joseph: Elizabethan Acting, page 28.
4 Stanley Wells: Shakespeare For All Time, page 14.
5 Quoted in Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 264.
6 Quoted in Joseph: Elizabethan Acting, page 11.
7 ibid., page 12.
8 Quoted in Andrew Gurr: Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, page 80.
9 ibid., page 17.
10 Dennis Kay: Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era, page 26.
11 Quoted in Mark Eccles: Shakespeare in Warwickshire, page 57.
Chapter Thirteen
1 Quoted in R. Savage (ed.): Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford upon Avon, 1553-1620, Volume Two, page xlvii.
2 Nicholas Rowe: Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespeare (London, 1848), page 17.
3 Quoted in Fripp: Shakespeare: Man and Artist, Volume One, page 155.
Chapter Fourteen
1 Quoted in Jonathan Bate (ed.): The Romantics on Shakespeare, page 304.
2 Quoted in Katherine Duncan-Jones: Ungentle Shakespeare, page 14.
3 Quoted in Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, pages 252-3.
4 ibid., page 265.
5 Quoted in Schoenbaum: Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, page 81.
6 ibid., page 80.
7 Quoted in C.C. Stopes: Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries, page 23.
8 Fripp: Shakespeare’s Stratford, page 2.
9 Quoted in Stopes: Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries, page 77.
Chapter Fifteen
1 T.W. Baldwin: William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, Volume Two, page 672.
2 Quoted in E.K. Chambers: Shakespearean Gleanings, page 52.
3 Richard Wilson: Secret Shakespeare, page 57.
4 ibid., page 58.
5 Quoted in E.A.J. Honigmann: Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” page 33.
6 A. Keen and R. Lubbock: The Annotator, page 9.
7 Quoted in Ivor Brown: How Shakespeare Spent the Day, page 167.
Chapter Sixteen
1 Quoted in Fripp: Shakespeare: Man and Artist, Volume One, page 173.
2 Edmond Malone: The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, Volume Two, A Life of the Poet, page 108.
Chapter Seventeen
1 Quoted in Mark Eccles: Shakespeare in Warwickshire, page 66.
2 Quoted in Wells: Shakespeare For All Time, page 269.
3 Quoted in Schoenbaum: Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, page 72.
4 Quoted in Fripp: Shakespeare: Man and Artist, Volume One, page 191.
Chapter Eighteen
1 Quoted in Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 253.
2 Quoted in Fripp: Shakespeare: Man and Artist, Volume One, page 195.
3 ibid., Volume Two, page 520.
Chapter Nineteen
1 Quoted in the introduction by E.I. Fripp to R. Savage (ed.): Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon, Volume Four, page xxi.
2 Quoted in Edwin Nungezer: A Dictionary of Actors, page 348.
3 Quoted in Fripp: Shakespeare: Man and Artist, Volume One, page 206.
4 Quoted in Andrew Gurr: The Shakespearean Playing Companies, page 203.
Chapter Twenty
1 Quoted in J.O. Halliwell-Phillips: Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, page 79.
2 Quoted in Schoenbaum: Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, page 101.
3 Quoted in Liza Picard: Elizabeth’s London, page 89.
Chapter Twenty-one
1 Timothy Mowl: Elizabethan and Jacobean Style, pages 13, 22 and 87.
2 Quoted in David Scott Kastan (ed.): A Companion to Shakespeare, page 43.
3 Quoted in Lawrence Manley: Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, page 431.
4 Quoted in Lawrence Manley (ed.): London in the Age of Shakespeare, page 106.
Chapter Twenty-two
1 Quoted in Lawrence Stone: The Family, Sex and Marr
iage in England, 1500-1800, page 520.
2 Quoted in Duncan-Jones: Ungentle Shakespeare, page 81.
Chapter Twenty-three
1 Quoted in Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 253.
2 Quoted in John Gross (ed.): After Shakespeare, page 10.
3 Baldassare Castiglione: The Courtyer (London, 1928), page 33.
4 Quoted in Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 266.
5 Quoted in Gross (ed.), After Shakespeare, page 7.
Chapter Twenty-four
1 Quoted in Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 265.
2 Quoted in J.O. Halliwell-Phillips: Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, Volume Two, page 288.
3 ibid.
4 Quoted in Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 288.
5 ibid., page 296.
6 Quoted in Edward Burns (ed.): King Henry VI, Part One, the Arden edition (London, 2000), page 19.
7 Quoted in Charles Nicholl: The Reckoning, page 268.
Chapter Twenty-five
1 Quoted in Dennis Kay: Shakespeare, page 62.
2 Quoted in E.K. Chambers: The Elizabethan and Caroline Stage, Volume Four, page 123.
3 Quoted in Charles Knight: William Shakespeare: A Biography, page 310.
4 Quoted in Halliwell-Phillips, Volume Two, page 354.
5 Quoted in Chambers: Shakespeare: Facts and Problems, Volume Two, page 386.
6 ibid., page 397.