A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  By 1598, Shakespeare’s relationship with the court had become increasingly reciprocal. He was not only a regular presence at court but also shaped how England’s leading families in turn gave voice to their political experiences, and his words entered into the court vocabulary as a shorthand for the complicated maneuvering and gossip that defined court life. Tobie Matthew, for example, can write to Dudley Carleton that “Sir Francis Vere is coming towards the Low Countries, and Sir Alexander Ratcliffe and Sir Robert Drury with him. ‘Honor pricks them on, and the world thinks that honor will quickly prick them off again’ ”—here paraphrasing Falstaff’s unvarnished truth about the dangers of pursuing honor in The First Part of Henry the Fourth: “Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on?… What is that ‘honor’? Air” (5.1.129–35). The gist of Matthew’s multilayered observation seems to be that while these ambitious men are spurred (pricked) on by honor, the consensus at court is that this pursuit will prove disastrous (to “prick off ” means to be marked to die).

  It’s not the only such example committed to writing to survive (and who knows how many similar allusions in conversation went unrecorded). At the end of February 1598, the Earl of Essex wrote to Secretary of State Cecil in France: “I pray you commend me also to Alexander Ratcliff and tell him for news his sister is married to Sir John Falstaff.” This time, the allusion to Shakespeare’s character is part of an in-joke about Lord Cobham (now nicknamed Falstaff for his family’s opposition to Shakespeare’s use of the name Oldcastle) playing the marital field, pursuing Ratcliff’s beautiful sister Margaret. Rumor also had it that Cobham was also in pursuit of the merchant Sir John Spenser’s rich daughter. Essex was at court on February 26, 1598—a day or so, perhaps, before he wrote this letter—where he might have seen the Chamberlain’s Men perform The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a sexually rapacious Falstaff gets his comeuppance. Essex loathed Cobham and alluding to Shakespeare’s character was a way of tweaking him (by linking him with Falstaff’s multiple wooing in the play) while not alienating Cobham’s powerful brother-in-law, Cecil. A year later, the Earl of Southampton’s wife could write to her husband about the latest gossip about Cobham’s sexual escapades in similarly veiled Shakespearean terms: “All the news I can send you that I think will make you merry is that I read in a letter from London that Sir John Falstaff is by his Mrs. Dame Pintpot made father of a goodly miller’s thumb, a boy that is all head and very little body.”

  No other Elizabethan playwright’s words or characters served as a similar kind of code for courtiers at this time because no other writer spoke to their preoccupations so directly as Shakespeare. It’s no surprise that the few references at this time to popular plays performed in aristocrats’ homes are limited to Shakespeare’s work, typically his histories. But there was no getting around the danger of alienating one powerful faction while pleasing another. Shakespeare walked a careful line, but as the Isle of Dogs episode made clear, the punishment for overstepping the bounds of the acceptable was severe. Trying to satisfy those at court introduced a different set of risks and constraints.

  Shakespeare’s way out of the dilemma of writing plays as pleasing at court as they were at the public theater was counterintuitive. Rather than searching for the lowest common denominator, he decided instead to write increasingly complicated plays that dispensed with easy pleasures and made both sets of playgoers work harder than they had ever worked before. It’s not something that he could have imagined doing five years earlier (when he lacked the authority, and London audiences the sophistication, to manage this). And this challenge to the status quo is probably not something that would have gone down well at the Curtain in 1599. But Shakespeare had a clear sense of what veteran playgoers were capable of and saw past their cries for old favorites and the stereotypes that branded them as shallow “groundlings.” He committed himself not only to writing great plays for the Globe but also to nurturing an audience comfortable with their increased complexity. Even before the Theatre was dismantled he must have been excitedly thinking ahead, realizing how crucial his first few plays at the Globe would be. It was a gamble, and there was the possibility that he might overreach and lose both popular and courtly audiences.

  Until recently, Shakespeare had been living in north London in rented quarters in St. Helen’s Bishopsgate. It was a popular area for actors, just a short walk to Shoreditch and the Theatre and Curtain. It was also a comfortable and upscale neighborhood, home to musicians and merchants. But by the time construction on the Globe had begun, Shakespeare moved to the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark, a rougher, raunchier neighborhood outside the city limits, but very close to where the new theater would stand. The rented quarters on the Bankside—he had always rented in London, restlessly moving around, to the frustration of tax collectors—could only have added to a sense of a fresh start, his new surroundings contributing in unpredictable ways to the great surge of creative energies that followed.

  As all this was going on, Shakespeare was trying to finish Henry the Fifth, which he had been thinking about for several years—as far back as 1596, when he decided to stretch the plot of his main dramatic source, the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, to cover the two parts of Henry the Fourth as well as Henry the Fifth. And events, professional and political, kept overtaking the play. The scars of revision that Henry the Fifth bears—inconsistencies, locales that are specified then altered, characters that are introduced then mysteriously disappear, repetitions that seem to be ghostly remnants of earlier drafts—testify to the extent to which Shakespeare’s conception of the play kept changing. It seems to have taken him a lot longer than usual to complete, and it’s unlikely that it was ready to be performed before late March 1599. Shakespeare knew by then that it would be the last play he would write for the loyal playgoers of the northern suburbs as well as one of the first that would enter the repertory of the Globe. As Shakespeare’s melancholy epilogue to Henry the Fifth acknowledges—with its backward glance at a decade’s worth of history plays with which he had entertained Shoreditch audiences—Henry the Fifth marked the end of one stage of his career and the uncharted beginning of another.

  WINTER

  – 1 –

  A Battle of Wills

  Late in the afternoon of Tuesday, December 26, 1598, two days before their fateful rendezvous at the Theatre, the Chamberlain’s Men made their way through London’s dark and chilly streets to Whitehall Palace to perform for the queen. Elizabeth had returned to Whitehall in mid-November in time for her Accession Day celebrations. Whitehall, her only London residence, was also her favorite palace, and she spent a quarter of her reign there, especially around Christmas. Elizabeth’s entrance followed traditional protocol: a mile out of town she was received by Lord Mayor Stephen Soame and his brethren, who were dressed in “velvet coats and chains of gold.” Elizabeth had come from Richmond Palace, where she had stayed but a month, having been at her palace at Nonsuch before that. Sanitation issues, the difficulties of feeding so many courtiers with limited local supplies, and perhaps restlessness, too, made the Elizabethan court resemble a large-scale touring company that annually wound its way through the royal palaces of Whitehall, Greenwich, Richmond, St. James, Hampton Court, Windsor, Oatlands, and Nonsuch. But in contrast with the single cart that transported an itinerant playing troupe with its props and costumes, a train of several hundred wagons would set off for the next royal residence, transporting all that was needed for the queen and seven hundred or so of her retainers to manage administrative and ceremonial affairs at a new locale.

  A century later Whitehall would burn to the ground, leaving “nothing but walls and ruins.” Archaeological reconstruction would be pointless, for Whitehall was more than just a jumble of Gothic buildings already out of fashion by Shakespeare’s day. It was the epicenter of English power, beginning with the queen and radiating out through her privy councillors and lesser courtiers. A cross between ancient Rome’s Senate and Coliseum, Whi
tehall was where ambassadors were entertained, bears baited, domestic and foreign policy determined, lucrative monopolies dispensed, Accession Day tilts run, and Shrovetide sermons preached. Above all, it was a rumor mill, where each royal gesture was endlessly dissected. When the Chamberlain’s Men performed at court, they added one more layer of spectacle.

  Whitehall figured strongly enough in Shakespeare’s imagination to make a cameo appearance in his late play Henry the Eighth. When a minor courtier describes how after her coronation at Westminster Anne Bullen returned to “York Place,” he is sharply corrected: “You must no more call it York Place; that’s past, / For since the Cardinal fell, that title’s lost.” Henry VIII coveted the fine building, evicted Cardinal Wolsey, and rechristened it: “ ’Tis now the King’s, and called Whitehall.” The courtier who so carelessly spoke of “York Place” apologetically explains that “I know it, / But ’tis so lately altered that the old name / Is fresh about me” (4.1.95–99). Whitehall’s identity was subject to royal whim, its history easily rewritten. That this exchange follows a hushed discussion of “falling stars” at court makes its political edge that much sharper.

  For a writer like Shakespeare, whose plays exhibit a greater fascination with courts than those of any other Elizabethan playwright, visits to Whitehall were inspiring. The palace was a far cry from anything he had ever experienced in his native Stratford-upon-Avon, which extant wills and town records portray as a drab backwater, devoid of high culture. There was little touring theater, few books, hardly any musical instruments, no paintings to speak of, the aesthetic monotony broken only by painted cloths that adorned interiors (like the eight that had hung in Shakespeare’s mother’s home in Wilmcote). It had not always been this way. Vivid medieval paintings of the Passion and the Last Judgment had once decorated the walls of Stratford’s church, but they had been whitewashed by Protestant reformers shortly before Shakespeare was born.

  Whitehall had everything Stratford lacked. It housed the greatest collection of international art in the realm, its “spacious rooms” hung “with Persian looms,” its treasures “fetched from the richest cities of proud Spain” and beyond. For an Englishman who (like his queen) had never left England’s shores, it offered a rare opportunity to see work produced by foreign artisans. A short detour up a staircase into the privy gallery overlooking the tiltyard led Shakespeare into a breathtaking gallery. Its ceiling was covered in gold, and its walls were lined with extraordinary paintings, including a portrait of Moses said to be “a striking likeness.” Near it hung a “most beautifully painted picture on glass showing thirty-six incidents of Christ’s Passion.” But the most eye-catching painting in the passageway was the portrait of young Edward VI. Those approaching it for the first time found that “the head, face and nose appear so long and misformed that they do not seem to represent a human being.” Installed on the right side of the painting was an iron bar with a plate attached to it. Visitors were encouraged to extend the bar and view the portrait through a small hole or “O” cut in the plate: to their surprise, “the ugly face changed into a well-formed one.”

  A few years earlier this famous picture had inspired Shakespeare’s lines about point of view in Richard the Second: “Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon / Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry / Distinguish form” (2.2.18–20). It may also have inspired a similar reflection in Henry the Fifth about seeing “perspectively” (5.2.321). What the Chorus in this play calls the “Wooden O,” the theater itself, operates much like this Whitehall portrait: its lens is capable of giving shape and meaning to the world, but only if playgoers make the necessary imaginative effort.

  Leaving this picture gallery, Shakespeare would next have entered the long privy gallery range that led past the Privy Council chamber, where Elizabeth’s will was translated into government policy. The Christmas holiday had not disrupted the councillors’ labors; seven of them had met there that day, ordering, among other things, that warm clothing be secured for miserably equipped English troops facing a bitter Irish winter. The councillors adjourned in time for that evening’s entertainment and resumed their deliberations the following morning.

  The winding corridor next led past Elizabeth’s private quarters, including her bedchamber, library, and the rooms in which she dressed and dined. When Elizabeth was not residing at Whitehall, these rooms were open for viewing. Contemporary reports of their splendors give some inkling of power on display. The ceiling of her bedchamber was gilded, though the room itself was dark, with only a single window. Elizabeth’s exotic bath attracted considerable notice, especially for how “the water pours from oyster shells and different kinds of rock.” The apartments also held organs and virginals that the queen herself played, as well as “numerous cunningly wrought clocks in all sizes.” And of course, the palace held the queen’s fabulously expensive and ornate wardrobe, of extraordinary interest to a player like Shakespeare, whose company invested so much of its capital on lavish costumes.

  The queen’s library also interested Shakespeare, stocked as it was with books in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and English, along with some of Elizabeth’s own manuscripts. This wasn’t just show: William Camden records that Elizabeth “either read or wrote something every day” and that in 1598 she “turned into the English tongue the greatest part of Horace’s De Arte Poetica and a little book of Plutarch’s De Curiositate, and wrote them with her own hand, though the rebellion in Ireland now flamed forth dangerously.” A monarch who wrote every day must have been an especially discriminating critic and perhaps better disposed than most to a playwright who did the same.

  As he neared the room in which he would perform that evening, Shakespeare first had to pass the privy chamber (which housed Hans Holbein’s famous mural of Henry VII, Henry VIII, and their wives, Elizabeth of York and Jane Seymour) and then the large and lofty presence chamber. This was the inner sanctum: only Elizabeth’s most intimate circle, her most favored courtiers, were permitted into the privy chamber, and the distinction between those in and those out was clear-cut. It was decorated with “a gilded ceiling” and “pictures of the wars [Elizabeth] has waged.”

  The overall impression, as one foreign visitor wrote in 1600, was that Whitehall was “a place which fills one with wonder.” In this respect, Whitehall resembled those other great wonder-producing sites of Elizabethan England, the public theaters. Like the theaters, it contained space for display as well as a backstage, with secret areas off limits to spectators that added to its mystery. There was as little concern for the mixing of artistic genres at court as there was in the playhouses. Visitors to Whitehall recorded their impressions of some of its more memorable artifacts, including a bust of Attila the Hun, a picture of “a cripple being carried on a blind man’s shoulders,” a Dutch still life, a group of portraits of the leading divines of the Protestant Reformation, a wind-up clock of “an Ethiop riding upon a rhinoceros,” a “genealogical table of the kings of England,” a “large looking-glass with a silk cover,” a portrait of Julius Caesar (which surely caught Shakespeare’s attention), a painting of Lucrece (which no doubt did as well), a sundial “in the form of a monkey,” a needlework map of Britain, a “description of the New World on two boards with maps of the same parts of the New World alongside,” and a mother-of-pearl organ bearing an inscription calling England’s virgin queen “another Mary” (an association sure to annoy Elizabeth’s puritan critics). Other objects also bore mottos or inscriptions, including one that read: “There are three things which destroyed the sovereignty of Rome: Hidden Hatred, Youthful Council, Self-Interest.” A good deal of the art was intended to flatter Elizabeth, such as the picture of “Juno, Pallas Athena, and Venus together with Queen Elizabeth.”

  Shakespeare would have appreciated the extent to which Whitehall was ultimately about competing, contested histories. Allusions to the Virgin Mary kept company with portraits of Reformation worthies. Fantasies of distant worlds—like the Ethiop bestride a rhinoceros—fought for att
ention with state-of-the-art maps and globes for extending the reach of English trade and colonization. Sundials shared space with the latest in Continental clock technology. The riches contained in the palace were distantly related to those found in that sixteenth-century phenomenon called the Wunderkammer, or wonder-cabinet. Ancestor of the modern museum, the wonder-cabinet was usually a room set aside to display exotic objects. The finest of these in London probably belonged to Walter Cope, a merchant-adventurer and a member of Elizabeth’s Society of Antiquaries. During his London visit in 1599, Thomas Platter visited Cope’s wonder-cabinet, “stuffed with queer foreign objects in every corner”: an African charm made of teeth, the bauble and bell of Henry VIII’s fool, an Indian stone ax and canoe, a chain made of monkey teeth, a Madonna constructed of Indian feather, a unicorn’s tail, and shoes from around the globe. In another, unnamed house of curios on London Bridge, Platter even saw “a large live camel.”

  What distinguishes Whitehall from the jumble of the wonder-cabinet is that the objects in the latter were connected only by their strangeness and capacity to produce amazement. Whitehall’s contents, in contrast, comprised a protean work in progress, its objects, rightly interpreted, conveying a complex narrative of dynastic power and political intrigue. No room in the palace better exemplified this than the shield gallery, a long hall overlooking the Thames, through which visitors arriving by boat passed on their way into the court. This gallery was crammed with hundreds of imprese—pasteboard shields on which were painted pictures and enigmatic Latin mottos.