The Year of Lear Page 3
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
(Sonnet 107, 5–8)
The language is elliptical but the meaning clear enough: all those anxious predictions that preceded the eclipse of Elizabeth—that “mortal moon”—were misplaced; the crowning of the new king who promoted himself as a peacemaker had put an end to these “Incertainties.”
But other uncertainties remained. The period leading up to and following the change in regime appeared less smooth in retrospect than Sonnet 107 would on its surface suggest, for the nation and for Shakespeare professionally. The Chamberlain’s Men, now established at the Globe, found themselves facing stiffer competition than ever. Back in 1594 there had been only three permanent outdoor playhouses in London: the Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, and the Rose on Bankside. Since then, new theaters continued to sprout around the City, competing for the pennies and shillings of London’s playgoers. Spectators were now flocking to see the Admiral’s Men at the Fortune Theatre (to the northwest, in the parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate), as well as to see Worcester’s Men perform at the Boar’s Head Inn (in Whitechapel), and to playhouses at St. Paul’s and Blackfriars, smaller indoor sites where boy companies performed plays by London’s edgier young dramatists. Aging public playhouses—the Curtain and the Swan in Southwark near Paris Garden Stairs—also peeled away customers.
Other and unexpected threats to the prosperity of Shakespeare and his fellow shareholders soon emerged. In early 1603, their influential patron, the Lord Chamberlain George Carey (second cousin to Queen Elizabeth), became seriously ill. More bad news followed. First came a Privy Council announcement on March 19, 1603, that because of concerns about civil unrest as Elizabeth lay dying, all public performances were canceled “till other direction be given.” News the following week of the queen’s death and the declaration that the King of Scots was now King of England as well, while reassuring the English that regime change would not be bloody, also meant that during this mourning period the playhouses were unlikely to open anytime soon. London’s playing companies must have been rocked by the next piece of disturbing news, as they waited to see how supportive of the theater King James would be. One of James’s first royal proclamations, on May 7, 1603, was to ban performances on the Sabbath. It was a punishing decree that cut into theatrical profits, for Sunday was the only day of the week that most playgoers weren’t laboring at work. Was this merely a sop to theater-hating Puritans or was it a sign that the new king saw little value in public theater?
The drumbeat of setbacks for Shakespeare and his company continued. King James didn’t wait for the ailing George Carey to die before replacing him as Lord Chamberlain. This meant that Shakespeare was no longer a Chamberlain’s Man, merely the servant of the disempowered Carey (who passed away in early September). The theater companies were facing their own succession struggle, one that would have to be resolved in the wake of the national one. At stake were royal patronage and the chance to be favored at court. It could not have been reassuring that the Earl of Nottingham, patron of their longtime rivals the Admiral’s Men, had secured a place in the new monarch’s inner circle.
Other unexpected and nagging threats emerged as the change in government encouraged those who wanted a share of the lucrative business of staging plays. Richard Fiennes, an aristocrat badly in need of money, proposed that in exchange for an annual payment of forty pounds he be awarded a patent allowing him to collect a poll tax of “a penny a head on all the playgoers in England.” Fiennes argued that since playgoing was a voluntary activity (much like what the king himself had deemed the “vile custom of tobacco taking”), it could be regulated and taxed by the state, and he would be happy to pay for overseeing that activity in exchange for a hefty cut of box office receipts. Since admission to the public playhouses started at a penny, Fiennes’s proposal was outrageously greedy. Luckily for London’s actors, nothing came of this nor of another proposal not long after from the other end of the social ladder, by a disabled veteran of the Irish wars, Francis Clayton. Fiennes had hoped to obtain a royal patent to tax playgoers; Clayton appealed to Parliament to tax performances, seeking for himself a “small allowance of two shillings out of every stage play that shall be acted . . . to be paid unto me or my assigns during my life by the owners and actors of those plays and shows.” It must have struck the players as absurd: anyone with a scheme and some political connections could submit a plan to cut into their hard-earned profits. Fiennes’s and Clayton’s proposals—although they went nowhere—were one more headache for Shakespeare and his fellows, vulnerable at this time of transition and of freewheeling and often unpredictable political largess.
Then, suddenly, came news that profoundly altered the trajectory of Shakespeare’s career: King James chose Shakespeare and his fellow players as his official company. After May 19, 1603, Shakespeare and eight others were to be known as the King’s Men, authorized to perform not only at the court and the Globe but also throughout the realm, if they wished to tour. It was more than a symbolic title; Shakespeare was now a Groom of the Chamber, and he and the other shareholders were each issued four and a half yards of red cloth for royal livery to be worn on state occasions.
Exactly how and why Shakespeare’s company was elevated to the position of King’s Men has never been satisfyingly explained. Their talent and reputation surely played a part. So too did a little-known English actor named Laurence Fletcher. Fletcher had spent time acting in Scotland, where King James had come to know and like him. This relationship accounts for why Fletcher’s name appears first, right before Shakespeare’s, in the list of those designated as the King’s Men, though he had never been affiliated with the company before this. Fletcher was merely a player; though a valuable go-between, he could not, by himself, have been responsible for Shakespeare’s company’s swift promotion. More powerful brokers were undoubtedly involved. One of them might have been the son of their dying patron, Sir Robert Carey, who had ridden posthaste from London to Edinburgh to bring James word of Elizabeth’s death. Others might have been Shakespeare’s former patron, the Earl of Southampton, newly released from the Tower, or perhaps the Earl of Pembroke, an admirer of Richard Burbage and a patron of poets and artists. Mystery will always surround how Shakespeare and his fellow players were chosen to be the King’s Men. What matters is that it happened and that they had won their own succession struggle—and the plays that Shakespeare would subsequently write would be powerfully marked by this turn of events.
The King’s Men did not have much of a chance to celebrate their good fortune, for London was soon struck by a devastating outbreak of plague. Even during years that were considered safe, Elizabethan London had rarely been entirely free of plague: there were forty-eight reported plague deaths in 1597; eighteen in 1598; sixteen in 1599; and four in 1600. The fresh outbreak apparently began in Lisbon in 1599, then spread to Spain and elsewhere on the Continent. By February 1603 it had reached London. By May, plague deaths had risen to more than twenty a week. Then, suddenly, the number of Londoners dying from the plague skyrocketed: by the end of July more than a thousand were perishing every week. James had just arrived from Edinburgh for his coronation and massive precautions were taken to prevent the infected from getting near him. Travel near Westminster by road or river was barred to ordinary citizens, and following the coronation James quickly withdrew to the relative safety of Hampton Court. The planned festivities and public celebration would have to wait.
King James wasn’t the only one fleeing the plague-ridden city. Even those who were infected tried to. A court official reported that “divers come out of the town and die under hedges in the fields, and divers places further off, whereof we have experience weekly here at Hampstead, and come in men’s yards and outhouses if they be open, and die there.” Some of the plague-stricken hurled themselves out of windows or drowned themselves in the Thames. Others turned to drink or to religion, and special prayers were read in London’s churches.
In late August, the height of the outbreak, desperate London authorities were reporting more than three thousand deaths a week, out of a population of roughly two hundred thousand. By the time cold weather slowed the outbreak that winter, nearly a third of the population had been struck: more than thirty thousand Londoners had died, while another thirty thousand or so were infected but managed to survive the terrible visitation. Enough fatalities were still being reported that winter and spring for the playhouses to remain closed. They reopened briefly in April 1604, before the return of plague with the onset of warmer weather led to their closing again until September. The long outbreak of plague meant that the King’s Men had to maintain themselves by touring through rural England’s towns and visiting great houses (a royal handout of thirty pounds also helped). Local records of their touring are spotty, but there are payments to them between 1603 and 1605 for performances at Bath, Shrewsbury, Coventry, Ipswich, Maldon, Oxford, Barnstaple, and Saffron Walden.
It took an underemployed playwright turned pamphleteer, Thomas Dekker, in his mordantly titled The Wonderful Year, to capture the full horrors of what it meant to be locked up by the authorities in an infested house:
What an unmatchable torment were it for a man to be barred up every night in a vast silent charnel-house, hung (to make it more hideous) with lamps dimly and slowly burning in hollow and glimmering corners? Where all the pavement should, instead of green rushes, be strewed with blasted rosemary, withered hyacinths, fatal cypress, and yew, thickly mingled with heaps of dead men’s bones. The bare ribs of a father that begat him, lying there; here the chapless hollow skull of a mo
ther that bore him. Round about him a thousand corpses; some standing bolt upright in their knotted winding sheets; others half-moldered in rotten coffins, that should suddenly yawn wide open, filling his nostrils with noisome stench, and his eyes with the sight of nothing but crawling worms. And to keep such a poor wretch waking, he should hear no noise but of toads croaking, screech-owls howling, mandrakes shrieking. Were not this an infernal prison?
It’s a challenge, four centuries later, to imagine the effects of this nightmare on those fortunate enough to survive.
While plague closures had suppressed the demand for new plays at the Globe, the royal family’s desire for fresh entertainment was proving insatiable. Under Elizabeth, Shakespeare’s company expected that two or three of its best plays each year would be selected for performance before the court between Christmas and Shrovetide. While King James may not have enjoyed watching plays as much as he enjoyed hunting, he nonetheless called for many more performances than his predecessor had, and expected most of these from the company he patronized. The King’s Men acted before James nine times in 1603–4, ten times during the expanded Christmas season of 1604–5, and yet another ten times during the similarly expanded winter holidays in 1605–6—more court appearances in this brief span than they had made altogether before Elizabeth.
Frustratingly, the names of plays and those who wrote them are almost never listed in records of court performances. But a remarkable Revels Account of what was staged at court during the holiday season of 1604–5 gives us a snapshot of how central a role Shakespeare played. These records tell us that “Shaxberd” was responsible for seven of the ten plays performed before king and court between Hallowmas Day in early November and Shrove Tuesday in late February: Othello, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors, Measure for Measure, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry the Fifth, and The Merchant of Venice twice, that encore performance “commanded by the king’s majesty.” Along with the court debuts of Othello and Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s company served up revivals of some of their greatest Elizabethan hits, which the Scottish royal family had never had a chance to see. The King’s Men also performed two of Ben Jonson’s popular Elizabethan comedies, Every Man in His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour, along with the anonymous and now lost The Spanish Maze. If this holiday season was representative, it meant that more than two-thirds of the plays staged at court by the company were Shakespeare’s. And if we assume that a similar percentage of his Elizabethan plays were acted before the king in the nineteen command performances at the 1604–5 and 1605–6 holiday seasons, there’s a good chance that by the beginning of 1606, of the close to thirty plays the King’s Men had played before James, twenty or so had been by Shakespeare, leaving only a handful of his old plays as yet unstaged before the new court.
The pressure to provide new plays had, if anything, intensified. A letter survives from January 1605 to the Earl of Salisbury (the king’s chief minister) from Sir Walter Cope, who had been tasked with finding fresh entertainment for the court, in which a frustrated Cope reports, “I have sent and been all this morning hunting for players, jugglers, and such kind of creatures, but find them hard to find.” Having come up empty-handed, he left notes for the various entertainers to report to him. One of those summoned was Richard Burbage, star of the King’s Men (or perhaps it was his brother Cuthbert, part owner of the Globe), for Cope’s letter continues: “Burbage is come and says there is no new play that the queen has not seen; but they have revived an old one called Love’s Labour’s Lost, which for wit and mirth he says will please her exceedingly.” Burbage’s enthusiastic pitch for Shakespeare’s dated Elizabethan comedy notwithstanding, his admission that “there is no new play” that Queen Anne “has not seen” was not what the authorities wanted to hear. Demand was rapidly outstripping supply, even of old favorites. It was time to write another play, and not long after he came upon that copy of King Leir, Shakespeare had decided on its subject. He would turn another Queen’s Men play into a King’s Men play. It’s not what one would have expected from a playwright struggling to connect with this Jacobean moment, especially a writer so identified with the drama of the 1590s. Yet however counterintuitive it may have seemed, Shakespeare saw that the best way for him to grapple with the present was to engage with the past, refurbishing an old and unfashionable Elizabethan plot.
If the Queen’s Men had been the all-star company of the 1580s, Shakespeare’s company were the all-stars of their day, and had been for over a decade. When Shakespeare sat down to write King Lear, he knew that he would be writing the part for Richard Burbage, the finest tragedian of the age. He had already created for him such career-defining roles as Richard the Third, Hamlet, and Othello. Burbage was now in his late thirties, which also meant that Shakespeare could expand his imaginative horizons and write plays that starred more grizzled and world-weary protagonists. Before 1606 was over, he would challenge Burbage not only in the role of Lear, but also in another pair of older tragic roles, Macbeth and Antony (while this same year Ben Jonson wrote for Burbage the brilliant part of Volpone, who play-acts the role of an infirm old man). No actor may ever have faced more daunting newly written roles in so short a time span. If Shakespeare was memorialized as the “soul of the age,” Burbage, some years later, and perhaps with a nod to that earlier tribute, was the acknowledged “soul of the stage.”
Reflecting back on the special relationship between great playwrights and their star actors, Richard Flecknoe observed in the mid-seventeenth century that it “was the happiness of the actors of those times to have such poets as these to . . . write for them,” and those poets were no less fortunate “to have such . . . excellent actors to act their plays as . . . Burbage,” who was known for “so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring-house) assumed himself again until the play was done.” Flecknoe helpfully describes the naturalistic acting style at which Burbage excelled: audiences “were never more delighted than when he spake, nor more sorry than when he held his peace; yet even then he was an excellent actor still, never falling in his part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gestures maintaining it still unto the height.” Shakespeare knew that he could count on Burbage to convey not only Lear’s words but also the telling gestures and great silences on which his part depends, something a reading experience of the play too often misses.
It wasn’t only Burbage who had aged. Many of the talented and ambitious players who had come together in their twenties in 1594 to form the Chamberlain’s Men were now approaching forty; Shakespeare, at forty-two, was now the oldest in the company. Some of the founders were not in good health and others were no longer alive. Augustine Phillips was already dead and Will Sly and Laurence Fletcher would be buried before two years had passed. John Sinklo, a longtime hired man for whom Shakespeare had been writing skinny-man parts for more than a decade, was either dead or had left playing, for no more was heard of him after 1605. The company’s first star comedian, Will Kemp, had parted ways with them back in 1599, pursuing a solo career, a blow to the company, for audiences were drawn to the theater for Kemp’s clowning as much as they were for Burbage’s tragic roles or Shakespeare’s words. Kemp’s replacement, Robert Armin, was a very different kind of comedian. While Armin could step into some of the roles Shakespeare had written for Kemp (such as Dogberry in Much Ado), Kemp’s improvisational and physical style and commonsensical if at times dim-witted demeanor couldn’t have been further from the sardonic, witty style of the diminutive Armin. It took awhile for Shakespeare to figure out how best to write Armin into his plays. He had some early success with the parts of Touchstone in As You Like It and Feste in Twelfth Night, and with smaller roles as the Gravedigger in Hamlet and perhaps Thersites in Troilus and Cressida. But it wasn’t until King Lear that Shakespeare created a truly defining role for Armin, Lear’s Fool (and it was probably with this role in mind that, four years later, John Davies praised Armin as one who could “wisely play the fool”).