A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  A Year In The Life Of William Shakespeare

  1599

  James Shapiro

  PREFACE

  In 1599, Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen. They also flocked to London’s playhouses, including the newly built Globe. It was at the theater, noted Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist who visited England and saw plays there in 1599, that “the English pass their time, learning at the play what is happening abroad.” England’s dramatists did not disappoint, especially Shakespeare, part owner of the Globe, whose writing this year rose to a new and extraordinary level. In the course of 1599 Shakespeare completed Henry the Fifth, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It in quick succession, then drafted Hamlet. This book is both about what Shakespeare achieved and what Elizabethans experienced this year. The two are nearly inextricable: it’s no more possible to talk about Shakespeare’s plays independent of his age than it is to grasp what his society went through without the benefit of Shakespeare’s insights. He and his fellow players truly were, in Hamlet’s fine phrase, the “abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (2.2.524).

  The commonplace that dramatists are best understood in relation to their time would go unquestioned if the writer in question were Euripides, Ibsen, or Beckett. But only recently has the tide begun to turn against a view of Shakespeare as a poet who transcends his age, who wrote, as Samuel Coleridge put it, “exactly as if of another planet.” The impulse to lift Shakespeare out of time and place was greatly enabled by the decision of Shakespeare’s first editors to present his plays out of chronological order. The First Folio of 1623 was put together by John Heminges and Henry Condell, who had worked alongside Shakespeare since the mid-1590s. Having spent most of their adult lives performing in Shakespeare’s plays they knew the sequence in which all but the earliest of them had been written. But they nonetheless decided to shoehorn them into the categories of comedies, histories, and tragedies (which made for a very uncomfortable fit for “tragedies” like Cymbeline and Troilus and Cressida). Even within these categories they ignored the order in which the plays were written, so that, for instance, the late great play The Tempest is the lead comedy in the First Folio.

  Their decision also made the question of how Shakespeare developed as a writer much harder to answer. Over a century and a half would pass before Edmond Malone, the first scholar to tackle this question, even tried to establish the “progress and order” of Shakespeare’s plays. And to this day there is no scholarly consensus about the dates or sequence of a number of the plays, especially the early ones. Imagining Shakespeare free of time and place has made it easier to accept Ben Jonson’s assertion that Shakespeare was “not of an age but for all time” and to forget that Jonson also called his great rival the “soul of the age” whose plays captivated Elizabethan playgoers. For Jonson, the two claims weren’t mutually exclusive: Shakespeare’s appeal is universal precisely because he saw so deeply into the great questions of his day. Shakespeare himself certainly thought of his art in this way: the “purpose of playing,” he wrote in Hamlet, is to “show… the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.20–24).

  Those who sever Shakespeare from his age do so because there is both too much and too little to know about the man and his times. Too much, because the richness of Shakespeare’s creative life during the quarter century from 1588 to 1613 is impossible to contain in a single volume or a single critical intelligence. Who can claim to fathom what’s at stake in every one of Shakespeare’s works? Nobody, surely, has ever mastered the hundreds of chronicles, plays, poems, and stories that inspired him. And the amount of information that historians have uncovered about life in Shakespeare’s England is daunting. They’ve shown that Elizabethan culture ought to matter a great deal to us, for we’ve inherited its conflicting views of everything from the nature of the self and sexuality to nationhood and empire.

  Too little, because we don’t know very much about what kind of friend or lover or person Shakespeare was. This, in turn, has opened the door to those who deny that Shakespeare wrote his plays and attribute them instead to Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon or the latest candidate, the Earl of Oxford. It’s unfortunate, because even if we don’t know much about his personality, we know a great deal about Shakespeare’s career as a writer (more than enough to persuade a reasonable skeptic that he wrote his plays himself). We’d know a lot more about his life had one of the seventeenth-century antiquarians interested in Shakespeare bothered to speak with his younger daughter, Judith, who was still alive in 1662, nearly a half century after Shakespeare died in 1616. One of those antiquarians, John Ward, even made a note in his diary reminding himself to call on her in Stratford-upon-Avon, but she died shortly thereafter, and with her, a direct and intimate sense of the kind of man Shakespeare was.

  At the heart of this book is the familiar desire to understand how Shakespeare became Shakespeare. The time-honored way biographers have gone about answering this question is to locate the wellspring of Shakespeare’s creative genius in his formative experiences. This is risky enough when writing the lives of modern authors like Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath, whose biographers have piles of correspondence, diaries, and photographs to sift through. It’s nearly impossible with Shakespeare, who left behind neither letters nor diaries. And the only two authentic portraits of Shakespeare to survive are posthumous. They depict a modestly dressed and serious man of medium build, with dark hair, full lips, large attentive eyes, a long straight nose, and an unusually large forehead. But neither the engraving on the title page of the First Folio nor the funeral monument that still stands in Stratford’s church—in which he looks more like an accountant than an artist—offers much of a window into Shakespeare’s soul. If Shakespeare had a say in this funeral monument he may have been responsible for its most salient feature, that he be remembered as an author: under his left hand is a sheet of paper and in his right one, poised to write, a quill. The overwhelming desire for a more expressive Shakespeare, a truer portrait of the artist, explains why paintings of imposters who more closely resemble the Shakespeare of our imagination now hang in the National Portrait Gallery and elsewhere and are the ones we find reproduced on everything from coffee mugs to editions of his works.

  Biographers can only guess how Shakespeare felt about his mother, father, brothers, sisters, neighbors, friends, schoolmates, or employers, or, for that matter, how or even where he spent his adolescence or the crucial “lost years” between his departure from Stratford and his arrival in London. Those committed to discovering the adult Shakespeare’s personality in his formative experiences end up hunting for hints in the plays that they then read back into what little can be surmised about his early years (and since the plays contain almost every kind of relationship and experience imaginable, this is not as hard to do as it sounds). But the plays are not two-way mirrors: while Shakespeare perfectly renders what it feels like to be in love, betrayed, or crushingly disappointed, it doesn’t necessarily follow, as one nineteenth-century critic put it, that he “must have loved unhappily like Romeo, and like Hamlet not have known for a time what to get on with next.”

  Circularity and arbitrariness are only part of the problem: cradle-to-grave biographers of Shakespeare tend to assume that what makes people who they are now, made people who they were then. Historians of sixteenth-century England are not so sure. Because almost nobody thought to write a memoir or keep a personal diary in Shakespeare’s day—revealing enough facts in themselves—we don’t know whether their emotio
nal lives were like ours. Their formative years certainly weren’t. Strangers breast-fed infants, and babies were often swaddled for their first year. Childhood was brief, and most adolescents, rich and poor, were sent from home to live and serve in other households. Plague, death in childbirth, harvest failures, and high infant mortality rates may have diminished the intensity of family bonds. And these bonds didn’t last as long: people lived, on the average, until their mid-forties (only one of Shakespeare seven brothers and sisters made it past forty-six). Eldest sons like Shakespeare inherited all, creating friction among siblings.

  Even such constants as love and marriage weren’t the same. The idea of marrying for love was fairly new. And though life was shorter, most Elizabethan men and women delayed marriage until their mid-twenties (and a surprising proportion, including Shakespeare’s three brothers, never married at all). Given the extremely low illegitimacy rates at the time, desire either must have been sublimated or found an outlet in nonprocreative sex—perhaps both. Even the meaning of key concepts, like what constitutes an “individual,” was different. Writers, including Shakespeare, were only beginning to speak of individuality in the modern sense of “distinctive” or “special,” the exact opposite of what it had long meant, “inseparable.” Given that this was an age of faith, or at the least, one in which church attendance was mandatory, religion, too, played a greater role in shaping how life, death, and the afterlife were imagined. All this suggests that as much as we might want Shakespeare to have been like us, he wasn’t. Conventional biographies of Shakespeare are necessary fictions that will always be with us—less for what they tell us about Shakespeare’s life than for what they reveal about our fantasies of who we want Shakespeare to be.

  I have no illusion that I can elude the dangers of circularity or arbitrariness. But I’ve tried my best to avoid their excesses by focusing on what can be known with greater confidence: the “form and pressure” of the time that shaped Shakespeare’s writing when he was thirty-five years old. I can’t report what Shakespeare ate or drank or how he dressed, but I can establish some of the things he did this year that were crucial to his career, what he read and wrote, which actors and playwrights he worked with, and what was going on around him that fueled his imagination. Throughout, I try to be especially cautious when advancing claims about how Shakespeare might have felt—knowing that, except through the distorting lens of what he expressed through his characters or the speaker of his sonnets, we have no access to his feelings. Still, I hope to capture some of the unpredictable and contingent nature of daily life too often flattened out in historical and biographical works of greater sweep. I’m also aware that neither lives nor history come sliced in neat one-year packages (and that even the question of when the year was thought to begin and end in Tudor England isn’t easily answered). Inevitably, I end up focusing more on things that can be dated, such as political and literary events, rather than on more gradual and less perceptible historical shifts—though because Shakespeare’s plays are remarkably alert to many of these, I do my best to attend to them as well.

  I’ve chosen to write about 1599 not only because it was an unusually fraught and exciting year but also because, as critics have long recognized, it was a decisive one, perhaps the decisive one, in Shakespeare’s development as a writer (and, happily, one from which a surprising amount of information about his professional life survives). My interest in this subject dates back fifteen years. At that time, though I was familiar with Shakespeare’s plays and taught them regularly, I didn’t know enough about the historical moment in which plays like As You Like It and Hamlet were written and which they engaged. I had no idea, for example, that England braced itself for an invasion in the summer of 1599, knew almost nothing about why English troops were fighting in Ireland, or about how rigorously the government cracked down at this time on histories, satires, and sermons. I was unaware that one of the best-selling books of 1599 was “The Passionate Pilgrim” by W. Shakespeare. I knew less than I should have about how Shakespeare traveled to and from Stratford or about the bookstalls and playhouses that he frequented in London (and it was only after I began working on this book that the foundations of the Globe and Rose theaters were rediscovered). And I was woefully informed about the worlds lost to Shakespeare: England’s recent Catholic past, the deforested landscape of his native Arden, and a rapidly fading chivalric culture. My ignorance extended beyond history. Along with other scholars, I didn’t fully grasp how extensively Shakespeare revised and what these changes revealed about the kind of writer he was. And my notion of the sources of Shakespeare’s inspiration was too bookish. It was one thing to know what Shakespeare was reading, another to know about what sermons he may have heard or what art he viewed in the royal palaces of Whitehall and Richmond, where he regularly performed.

  This work, then, grew out of frustration with how much I didn’t know and frustration with scholars of all critical denominations who never quite got around to addressing the question I found most pressing: how, at age thirty-five, Shakespeare went from being an exceptionally talented writer to one of the greatest who ever lived. Put another way: how, in the course of little over a year, did he go from writing The Merry Wives of Windsor to writing a play as inspired as Hamlet? In search of answers I was fortunate to have access to the archives where the literary treasures of Elizabethan England have been preserved—especially the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and the British Library (at both its old and new London addresses). Over time, I had a chance to read almost all of the books written in 1599 that Shakespeare might have owned or borrowed or come upon in London’s bookstalls. My focus on a single year has also allowed me to reflect on the events of that year—recorded in contemporary letters, sermons, plays, poems, diaries, travelers’ accounts, and official records—that had a bearing on Shakespeare’s life and work. While I also read unpublished materials, I tried to focus on what Shakespeare’s contemporaries could have put their hands on. I found myself as interested in rumors as in facts, in what Elizabethans feared or believed as much as in what historians later decided really happened. This book is the result of those labors. It has brought me closer to understanding Shakespeare, and for that alone, it has been worth it.

  My hope is that the story offered in these pages can convey a sense of how deeply Shakespeare’s work emerged from an engagement with his times. To arrive at that point, though, means recounting a good deal of social and political history. I’ve done my best to present this context briefly and accessibly, but I recognize that some may find the early chapters slow going. I beg the indulgence of those eager to learn more about how Shakespeare wrote his plays but impatient with a series of forced marches through terrain as varied as the gardens of Whitehall Palace and the bogs of Ulster. As in Shakespeare’s plays, a scene or two must pass before the hero takes center stage. And as grounded as my claims are in what scholars have uncovered, a good deal of what I make of that information remains speculative. When writing about an age that predated newspapers and photographic evidence, plausibility, not certitude, is as close as one can come to what happened. Rather than awkwardly littering the pages that follow with one hedge after another—“perhaps,” “maybe,” “it’s most likely,” “probably,” or the most desperate of them all, “surely”—I’d like to offer one global qualification here. This is necessarily my reconstruction of what happened to Shakespeare in the course of this year, and when I do qualify a claim, it signals that the evidence is inconclusive or the argument highly speculative. Readers interested in the historical sources on which I rely will find them in the bibliographical essay at the end of the book.

  The Shakespeare who emerges in these pages is less a Shakespeare in Love than a Shakespeare at Work. When the seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey asked those who were acquainted with Shakespeare what they remembered about him, he was told that Shakespeare “was not a company keeper,” and that he “wouldn’t be deb
auched, and, if invited,” excused himself, saying “he was in pain.” The image of Shakespeare turning down invitations to carouse with such a lame excuse has a strong ring of truth, and the anecdote reveals as much as we are likely to learn about the value Shakespeare placed on the time he had free to write. As a resident playwright as well as actor in the Chamberlain’s Men, a playing company that performed nearly year-round, most of Shakespeare’s mornings were taken up with rehearsals, his afternoons with performances, and many of his evenings with company business, such as listening to freelance dramatists pitch new plays to add to the repertory. He had precious few hours late at night and early in the morning free to read and write—often by flickering candlelight and fighting fatigue. If Shakespeare was in love in 1599, it was with words. What follows, then, is a writer’s life: what Shakespeare read, wrote, performed, and saw published, and what was going on in England and beyond its shores that shaped plays which four hundred years later continue to influence how we make sense of the world.

  Prologue

  The weather in London in December 1598 had been frigid, so cold that ten days before New Year’s the Thames was nearly frozen over at London Bridge. It thawed right before Christmas, and hardy playgoers flocked to the outdoor Rose playhouse in Southwark in record numbers. But the weather turned freezing cold again on St. John’s Day, the twenty-seventh, and a great snowstorm blanketed London on December 28.

  As the snow fell, a dozen or so armed men gathered in Shoreditch, in London’s northern suburbs. Instead of the clubs usually wielded in London’s street brawls or apprentice riots, they carried deadly weapons—“swords, daggers, bills, axes, and such like.” Other than the Tower of London, which housed England’s arsenal, about the only places to come by some of the larger weapons were the public theaters, where they were used to give a touch of realism to staged combat. In all likelihood, these weapons were borrowed from the Curtain playhouse, near Finsbury Field, temporary home of the Chamberlain’s Men.