Shakespeare, page 55
A second hearing took place on 19 June, when Shakespeare’s memory would have been further put to the test, but Shakespeare did not appear on that occasion. Like many such cases it grumbled on without any definite conclusion. It was referred to arbitration, and Belott was awarded a little over £6, but no payment by Mountjoy is recorded. The details of this ancient case are no longer of any consequence, except in so far as they help to illuminate Shakespeare’s life in the ordinary world. He seems to have been willing to act as a “go-between” in delicate marital negotiations, no doubt because he had a reputation for finesse in such matters. He was clearly not a forbidding or unapproachable man; quite the contrary. But when called to account for his actions he becomes non-committal or impartial, maintaining a studied neutrality. He withdraws; he becomes almost invisible.
CHAPTER 87
Let Time Shape, and There an End
There is a curious mention of a play performed at Whitehall on 8 June 1612, in front of the Ambassador of the Duke of Savoy. It was entitled Cardenna. It was then performed again at court in the following year, under the title of Cardenno. It is curious because, at a later date, a play was registered for publication under the title of “The History of Cardenio by Mr. Fletcher & Shakespeare.” It is well known that in this period Shakespeare and Fletcher were indeed collaborating upon dramas for the King’s Men. The fruits of their joint endeavours were to include All Is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It may be that Shakespeare had entered semi-retirement and that Fletcher had in fact taken over from Shakespeare as the company’s principal dramatist. Cardenio would then have as much claim to authenticity as the two other plays which have now formally entered the Shakespearian canon. But Cardenio has not survived. It is a lost play. It may have been derived from the first part of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which the character of Cardenio emerges, and in 1758 Lewis Theobald, a distinguished editor of Shakespeare’s works, published a play on the story of Cardenio which he claimed to be “revised and adapted” from a manuscript in his possession “written originally by W. Shakespeare.” No trace of the manuscript has been found.
If Shakespeare did indeed play a part in writing Cardenio in 1612, it is the only drama of that year with which he can be associated. All subsequent plays would also be collaborative works. So there is clear evidence of a diminution of activity, the reasons for which are unclear. It may have been encroaching ill-health; it may have been the pleasures of Stratford and of retirement; it may simply have been the loss or lack of inspiration. He may have done as much as he had ever wanted to do. It is not an unusual scene in the last years or months of a writer’s life. He did not necessarily “know” that he would be dead within three years; when his imagination dimmed, death may have intervened naturally.
There was one unwanted and unwarranted publication, however, in this year. The printer William Jaggard brought out a third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim in which five of Shakespeare’s poems, purloined for the occasion, were added to much inferior stuff and the whole advertised as “by W. Shakespeare.” One of the authors whose work had been pirated for this collection, Thomas Heywood, then complained of the “manifest injury” done to him. He went on to claim that “the Author,” or Shakespeare himself, was “I know much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknowne to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.”1 Shakespeare’s remonstrances must have had some effect, because a second title-page was added without any attribution to him. It is a trivial incident that displays the extent of Shakespeare’s literary fame.
In his preface to The White Devil, published this year, John Webster adverts to “the right happy and copious industry of M. Shake-speare, M. Decker & M. Heywood.”2 It may seem odd at this late date to include Shakespeare with such manifestly inferior writers, but the disparity would not have occurred to anyone at the time. Contemporaries lack the subtle discrimination of posterity. In this case the emphasis is being placed upon the three dramatists’ fluency and speed of production. Ben Jonson had said as much in the same year, with his address to the reader in The Alchemist in which he disparaged those dramatists who “to gain the opinion of copy”3 or facility, will not check or polish their invention. Jonson’s disguised complaint was that Shakespeare had written too much. It is not likely to have been a criticism upheld by the audiences of the period.
From Christmas 1612 through to 20 May 1613, the King’s Men played continually at court as well as Blackfriars and the Globe. Among the royal performances were those of Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Othello and Cardenio. For the betrothal and marriage of King James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, the King’s Men played on no fewer than fourteen occasions. For these performances they received the large sum of £153 6s 8d.
Despite the evident fact that Shakespeare was writing less there is no indication that he was losing his interest in, or enthusiasm for, the theatre itself. In March 1613, for example, he completed negotiations to buy the gatehouse of Blackfriars. It was described as a “dwelling house or Tenement” partly built over “a great gate.” It was against the building known as the King’s Wardrobe on the west side, and on the east bordered a street that led down to Puddle Dock; the price also included a plot of ground and a wall. Part of it had once been a haberdasher’s shop. He was now very close to the Blackfriars playhouse and, by means of a wherry from Puddle Dock, in easy reach of the Globe on the other side of the river. Shakespeare paid £140 for the property, of which £80 was in cash and the other £60 tied up with a kind of mortgage.
The purchase may have been purely an investment on Shakespeare’s part, but then why break the habit of a lifetime and invest in London rather than in Stratford property? It may have been the propinquity to the playhouses that steered his decision. Did he still think of himself as a man of the theatre? He was now collaborating with Fletcher, and could hardly have done so from Stratford. He may simply have grown tired of living in lodgings, and wanted some permanent home in the capital. He was still only in his forties and, despite the deaths of two of his brothers, he may have had little reason to doubt his longevity.
There were, as so frequently in seventeenth-century legal transactions, complications. Shakespeare brought in with him three co-purchasers or trustees to safeguard his interest. One of them was Heminges, his colleague from the King’s Men, and another was the landlord of the Mermaid Tavern, William Johnson. This suggests some familiarity on Shakespeare’s part with the famous drinking-place. The third trustee was John Jackson—also an habitué of the Mermaid—whose brother-in-law, Elias James, owned a brewery by Puddle Dock Hill. They were three local men of some repute, therefore, and represent precisely the kind of society to which Shakespeare had become accustomed. It has been suggested that Shakespeare chose these trustees so that a third of the property would not automatically be inherited by his wife, as her “dower” right, and there may have been some agreement (no longer extant) on its use after his death. In 1618, two years after his death, the trustees did in fact convey the gatehouse to John Greene of Clement’s Inn and to Matthew Morrys of Stratford “in performance of the confidence and trust in them reposed by William Shakespeare deceased, late of Stretford aforesaid, gent., … and according to the true intent and meaning of the last will and testament of the said William Shakespeare.”4
Morrys and Greene were part of Shakespeare’s extended family. Morrys had been the confidential secretary of William Hall, who was the father of John Hall, Shakespeare’s son-in-law, and had been entrusted with William Hall’s books on alchemy, astrology and astronomy in order to instruct John Hall on these arcane matters. Greene was a friend and neighbour, the brother of Thomas Greene who had resided for a while in New Place. It looks very much as if these two men were acting as agents on behalf of John Hall and his wife Susannah Shakespeare. It was the only London property owned by the Shakespeare family, and the beneficiaries may have wished to make good use of it. So by means of complication and indirection Shakespeare made sure that the house reverted to his oldest daughter rather than to his wife. Any interpretation is possible, the most likely being that Anne Shakespeare had neither need nor use for a house in the capital. She never actually visited London, as far as is known, and is hardly likely to have done so after the death of her husband. Or the whole matter may have simply been a technical or legal device to expedite a quick mortgage without incurring a fine. It is all too easy to over-interpret ancient documents.
The gatehouse did have a very curious history, however, largely concerned with its role as a papist “safe-house” in times of trouble. As the former home of the black friars, before the dissolution of the monasteries, it carried some ancient spirit of place. In 1586 a neighbour complained that the house “hath sundry back-dores and bye-wayes, and many secret vaults and corners. It hath bene in tyme past suspected, and searched for papists.”5 A relative of the Lancashire Hoghtons, Katherine Carus, died here “in all her pride and popery.”6 Then in later years it was used as a hiding-place for recusant priests, and it was searched many times. In 1598 it was reported that it had “many places of secret conveyance in it” as well as “secret passages towards the water.”7 The owners admitted to being adherents of the old faith, but denied harbouring priests. The papist connection may simply be coincidental, and Shakespeare may have purchased the house for quite other reasons, but it is suggestive of a certain affection or nostalgia.
It seems that he also leased out a set of rooms in the gatehouse to John Robinson, son of a Catholic recusant who had harboured priests in Blackfriars and brother of a priest who was lodged at the English College in Rome.
Robinson’s affiliations are really not in doubt, and he may in fact have acted as a “recruiting agent” for the Jesuit college at St. Omer.8 In his will Shakespeare refers to the gatehouse “wherein one John Robinson dwelleth scituat.” Some biographers suggest that Robinson was a servant rather than a tenant of Shakespeare, but the connection was in any case a close one. Robinson visited Stratford, and was one of those who attended New Place in Shakespeare’s dying days. He was a witness who signed the dramatist’s will. Nothing else is known of him. The cloak of Shakespeare’s invisibility covers those closest to him.
There is much that is perplexing about Shakespeare’s association with known or suspected recusants. A list of his acquaintance will reveal six men who suffered death for the old faith; in 1611 John Speed explicitly linked the dramatist with the Jesuit missionary, Robert Persons, as a “petulant poet” and “malicious papist”9 intent on treasonable practice. There is a connection, glimpsed by his contemporaries, but it remains occluded.
One of Shakespeare’s new neighbours was Richard Burbage, who owned a great deal of property in Blackfriars. In fact, shortly after purchasing the gatehouse, Shakespeare collaborated with his colleague in a surprising venture. They designed an impresa for the Earl of Rutland, to be worn by that young nobleman on the occasion of the Accession Day tilt of 24 March. An impresa was a badge or token which acted as a kind of cipher for the wearer’s moral characteristics; it generally included an emblem, and a motto, painted upon pasteboard. Shakespeare’s motto for Rutland may have been suitably cryptic. A courtier of the time noted that some of the imprese were so obscure “that their meaning is not yet understood, unless perchance that were their meaning, not to be understood.”10 Shakespeare was paid 44 shillings in gold pieces for the design of the device, and Burbage the same amount for constructing and painting it. The object itself has not survived, but clearly the young earl considered that Shakespeare and Burbage were the two most prominent of the courtly makers. Burbage also had a considerable reputation as a part-time artist. The Earl of Rutland may also have seen the impresa created by Shakespeare for the tournament of Pericles, and had been suitably “impressed.”
It should not be a surprise that Shakespeare, at this late stage of his career, was called upon to perform relatively minor tasks. He had in his youth been called a “Johannes factotum,” after all, and he may have enjoyed the opportunity of creating on a small scale. It has for some time been suspected, for example, that he composed epitaphs for his friends and colleagues—sometimes in game and sometimes in earnest. There is extant an epitaph to Elias James, the brewer whose premises were on Puddle Dock Hill. It is to be found in a manuscript that includes a poem, “Shall I die?,” which has also been tentatively attributed to Shakespeare. The seventeenth-century antiquary Sir William Dugdale, who has a reputation for accuracy, stated that the epitaphs on the tombs of Sir Thomas Stanley and Sir Edward Stanley in Tonge Church “were made by William Shakespeare, the late famous tragedian.”11 They strengthen the dramatist’s connection with the Stanley family, and increase our understanding of the acquaintance of “gentle” Shakespeare. It seems likely that Shakespeare also composed the epitaph for his friend and neighbour in Stratford, John Combe, and in fact Combe’s tomb was constructed by the partnership of Garret and Johnson close to the Globe on Bankside. Shakespeare evinces a particular interest in, and fondness for, funereal monuments; no doubt the Combe family left the commissioning in his hands. It has also been suggested that Shakespeare’s own epitaph, containing the famous curse on anyone who moves his bones, was written by the incumbent himself.
CHAPTER 88
I Haue Not Deseru’d This
An incident on the afternoon of Tuesday 29 June 1613 threw all of Shakespeare’s plans into confusion. The King’s Men were playing All Is True at the Globe, a play concerning the marital affairs of King Henry VIII upon which Shakespeare collaborated with Fletcher. It was a new play, having been performed only two or three times previously. The courtier, Sir Henry Wotton, has left a complete account of the disaster that ensued. “Now,” he wrote:
King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.1
Another observer of less sardonic temper noted that “the fire catch’d & fastened upon the thatch of the house, and there burned so furiously as it consumed the whole house, & all in lesse than two houres (the people having enough to doe to save themselves).”2 A third account confirmed that all of the spectators escaped without injury “except one man who was scalded with the fire by adventuring in to save a child which otherwise had been burnt.”3
It was a disaster for the King’s Men, who had been deprived of a venue and an investment in one swift action. It might have been an enactment of Prospero’s words that “the great Globe it selfe” shall “dissolue” and “Leaue not a racke behinde.”
There was of course the immediate matter of rebuilding. Shakespeare owned a fourteenth part of the theatre’s shares, and was therefore liable for one fourteenth of the cost; this amounted to something like £50 or £60. He still owed £60 for the mortgage on the Blackfriars gatehouse, to be paid back within six months. Even for an affluent country landowner, these were large sums of ready money. Since there is no mention of the Globe shares in his will, it is possible that he sold them as a consequence of the fire. The Globe rose again within a year, but without Shakespeare as part owner. On this, or a later, date he also sold his shares in the Blackfriars playhouse. His financial interest in the theatre had come to an end. It is possible that he gave up play-writing when he gave up his shares, a practical end to a thoroughly pragmatic career.
There was a further, private, anxiety concerning his daughter Susannah. In the summer of this year she had brought an action of defamation against a neighbour, John Lane, who had claimed that she had “the running of the raynes & had bin naught with Rafe Smith”—that she had had sexual intercourse with Rafe Smith, in other words, and had contracted gonorrhoea. In the small enclosed community of Stratford, these were controversial allegations indeed against the wife of a prominent doctor and daughter of a local eminence. The case was heard in the bishop’s Consistory Court at Worcester Cathedral, a measure of the seriousness with which the affair was taken, but John Lane did not appear for questioning. The case brought by Susannah Shakespeare was proved, and John Lane was excommunicated.
In the latter part of 1613, in the absence of the Globe and the now almost predictable closure of Blackfriars from July to December, the King’s Men toured in the late summer and autumn in Folkestone, Oxford, Shrewsbury and Stratford itself. They played fourteen times at court, and among the court performances were the two plays jointly written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. All Is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen were the last fruit of Shakespeare’s association with the King’s Men, and as such have the curious status of all last things. It is likely that Shakespeare was himself at court to receive the congratulations and thanks of his sovereign. All Is True was performed at the Globe, unhappily as it turned out, but it was equally well suited to the private circumstances of court performance and preeminently to the indoors playhouse at Blackfriars. In one of those rare moments of dramatic enchantment, some of the events depicted in the play actually occurred in the same great chamber of the Blackfriars where the performance was being held. The re-enactment was so astonishingly complete that there must have been a somewhat eerie feeling of historical déjà vu about the whole performance. The scene in question concerns the appearance of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon in a consistory court, before the papal legate, to determine whether their marriage was legal or not. It was not a divorce court, as some have alleged; if there had been no marriage, there could be no divorce. It was a solemn and sacred occasion none the less, and in All Is True it is imparted with a weight of dramatic spectacle and rhetoric.
