But this rough magic
I do here abjure; and when I have requir’d
Some heavenly music – which even now I do –
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
Shakespeare, The Tempest, V, i
The King’s Men were fortunate for even before they acquired their second theatre the fact that they had a royal patron meant that from the start they were able to achieve a certain amount of security in an increasingly cold financial climate. For the plague epidemic of the year of the Queen’s death and the accession of James was, if anything, even worse than that of ten years earlier. As the rhyme said:
Whole households and whole streets are stricken,
The sick do die, the sound do sicken.
And Lord have mercy on us crying,
Ere mercy come, that they are dying.
But although the epidemic abated somewhat towards the end of 1604, the disease did not go away and for the next ten years the playhouses were regularly closed for anything from a few weeks to several months, leaving all too many of those involved in the theatre unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. The King’s Men had the additional bonus of regularly being commanded to play at Court and in 1606 they had the opportunity not only to earn some money but also to flatter their illustrious patron.
King James had invited the Queen’s brother, King Christian IV of Denmark, to England on a state visit. It was to be a grand affair, the entertainment lavish, so it was therefore to be expected that the King’s own company of players should perform before the royal guest. The actor Richard Huggett in his book, The Curse of Macbeth, suggests that Shakespeare might well have been summoned in person to the office of the comptroller in Whitehall Palace, have had the situation explained to him and be then asked, as a member of the King’s own company, to provide a new and suitable play for the occasion. As ever, scholars disagree, but the consensus of the majority of academics is that Shakespeare did indeed write Macbeth especially for the event and that it was performed before the Court during the summer of 1606, probably on 7 August, although the first recorded public performance was that seen by Simon Forman at the Globe five years later.
There is much to suggest this is true, since what better subject to please the King than a play featuring two Scottish kings, the spirits of five others and his ancestor, Banquo, while also drawing attention to his expertise in witchcraft? Possibly Shakespeare read the King’s own book on the subject, Daemonologie, to acquire the mood for it, and he certainly read Holinshed’s Chronicles of Scotland. He might also have known that when the King visited Oxford the previous year Dr Matthew Gwinn, a Fellow of St John’s College, had laid on an entertainment entitled The Three Sybils derived from ‘three women in strange and wild apparel . . . either the Weird Sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destiny or else some nymphs or fairies who accost Macbeth and Banquo’. If that is so then it could well have been why Forman described the three witches in Macbeth as looking like nymphs or fairies rather than the wizened old women of popular mythology. Another suggestion is that the play is as short as it is because it was designed to suit the King’s attention span; it was not unusual for him to go to sleep during theatrical performances.
Although Macbeth remains to this day one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays and still packs in audiences, it has carried an enormous amount of baggage with it over the last four hundred years. Popular legend has it that it almost inevitably brings bad luck with it, that a production can lead to death, doom and disaster for all those involved. In his book Huggett writes that the famous ‘curse of Macbeth’ struck at the very first performance when Hal Berridge, the boy playing Lady Macbeth, was taken ill and that Shakespeare himself was forced to take over the role.1 He claims John Aubrey as the source but this writer has so far been unable to track down the reference. But even if it could be found it should perhaps be greeted with caution in view of other theatrical information peddled by Aubrey for according to him Ben Jonson ‘killed Mr. Marlowe, the Poet, on Bunhill, comeing [sic] from the Greencurtain playhouse’.2 Some claim that the ‘curse’ is in the text of the play itself because the famous chant given to the witches which begins ‘Fillet of a fenny’s snake, Eye of newt and toe of frog . . .’ is an authentic black magic spell. It is also suggested that so far from pleasing the King the emphasis on witchcraft and the way it was dealt with upset him, which is why no other performance was recorded for five years, but if this was the case, then there is no record of it.
Given the financially hard times those dramatists were fortunate that had other ways of earning an income. It seems that few of them by then were also actors, as had sometimes been the case in the past. We do not know when Shakespeare gave up acting or how good he was, although he was obviously sufficiently competent to remain a member of the acting company for a number of years. Apart from the role of Master Knowell in Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour, there is only hearsay evidence as to parts he played. His brother Gilbert, now established as a haberdasher, did visit London to see his brother’s plays and watch him act (possibly Edmund too), and is said to have told a neighbour on his return to Stratford that he had seen Will play Adam in As You Like It and that he was ‘brought on to the stage on another man’s back’, presumably that of the actor playing Orlando.3 Theatre tradition also gives him the ghost in Hamlet and the far more showy, and unlikely roles of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, though the actor Ian Richardson, who played Berowne for the Royal Shakespeare Company, became convinced that he was playing ‘the man himself. I know that there is some scholarly dispute about that but I think Dr. Rowse would agree. Here is Shakespeare talking, here he is with all his verbal quips . . . it is the only Shakespeare role I have played where, on the last performance, I wept.’4 If he did continue well into the early 1600s then it must have been by choice.
George Chapman who, as we know, had financial problems right from the start, supplemented his income with translation, tackling first Homer’s Iliad and then the Odyssey, under the patronage of the King’s eldest son, Prince Henry, on the understanding that once he had completed the first part of the task he would have a pension for life. The Iliad was finally published in 1611 and he must have sighed with relief as he saw security finally within his grasp, but unfortunately Prince Henry died that same year and the King reneged on the arrangement, leaving Chapman to face his most serious financial crisis yet and a great deal of debt.
The profession widely regarded as having a licence to print money is that of the law, and three of the Jacobean dramatists, John Marston, John Ford and John Webster all trained as lawyers, when it might well be that they also developed a taste for theatre since plays were a popular form of entertainment at the Middle Temple, where they all studied. Marston’s father, a Shropshire lawyer, was the Recorder of Coventry when Marston was born and became Lent Reader at the Middle Temple in 1592. On 2 August of that year the sixteen-year-old Marston was ‘especially’ admitted to the Middle Temple by his father. He was a very privileged student and a bright future had beckoned him, as two years later he achieved his first degree. But he had started writing for publication almost as soon as he began to study.
‘Eroticism and satire’, writes M.C. Bradbrook in her biography of John Webster, ‘both fashionable, were Marston’s scandalous choice for poetry of an ambivalent, yet pointed, wit.’ He soon involved himself in the world of the playhouses, although records suggest that from time to time he returned to the Middle Temple and undertook some legal work, probably sharing his father’s chambers there until, in 1599, his father died, leaving his own law books ‘to him whom I hoped would have profited by them in the study of the law, but man proposeth and God disposeth’.5
Thereafter for some years it seems God disposed that Marston would devote his time to his theatrical interests, rather than his official profession. At least his father did not live to see the part played by his son in the well-publicised Poets’ War or the trouble he was in over Eastward Ho! Marston had his greatest success in 1604 with his play The Malcontent, but after that he started to lose his taste for it and some time in 1607 began to study seriously for the ministry. The next time we hear of him, on 8 June 1608, he has been committed to Newgate gaol on an unspecified charge, although it is thought that this was a formality to do with some kind of a legal infringement connected with the breaking up of the Queen’s Revels Company in which he then had a share, not anything political or serious. On 24 September 1609 he was made a Deacon in the Parish Church of Stanton Harcourt, went from there to St Mary’s Hall, Oxford, to study further and on 18 June 1610 was ordained priest before finally, some years later, being given the lucrative living of Christchurch in Hampshire. He had come a long way from the precocious law student who first made his name with Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image, described by Bradbrook as ‘frankly pornographic’.
Of the second of the trio of lawyers, John Ford, we know very little except that he spent his entire adult life hard up and casting round for funds. Born in 1586 into a family of Devon gentry, he was related to the then Lord Chief Justice Popham. After possibly studying at Exeter College, Oxford, he was admitted to the Middle Temple where his behaviour was sufficiently bad for him to be sent down for two years. His misdemeanours included taking part in a protest against ‘wearing caps in hall’ and not paying his bills. His first published work appeared in 1606 but his early plays are among those lost by Warburton’s cook and he remains best known for his extraordinary ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which is actually about incest not prostitution, and various collaborations with Dekker.
His father died in 1610, presumably having given up on him, his will having been drawn up by John’s brother, Henry, wherein it was willed: ‘To John Ford, gent, my brother twenty pounds a year for the term of his life . . . upon condition he surrender the estate he hath of two tenements called Glandfields grounds in Bilver park and willow meade, lying in Ipplepen and Torbryam, to the use of my children.’ This at least gave him a small but regular income and it does seem that from time to time he returned to the law to earn a meagre income. An odd description of him survives in two lines of anonymous verse:
Deep in a dump John Ford was got
With folded arms and melancholy hat.
However out of the three lawyers it is John Webster, whom we first came across in 1602 writing for Henslowe, who managed successfully to combine working in the theatre with both law and the family business. T.S. Eliot’s verse about him is well known:
Webster was much possessed by death,
And saw the skull beneath the skin
And breastless creatures underground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
An unkind description of him, penned by a Henry Fitzjeffrey, claims:
But h’st! with him Crabbed Websterio,
The playwright, cartwright: whether? either? ho?
No further, look as ye’d be looked into:
Sit as he would read: Lord, who knows of him?
Was ever man so mangled with a poem?
See how he draws his mouth awry of late,
How he scrubs; wrings his wrists; scratches his pate.
A midwife! Help! By his Brain’s coitus,
Some centaur strange: some huge Bucephalus,
Or Pallas (sure) engendered in his brain,
Strike Vulcan with thy hammer once again.6
It is particularly insulting and snobbish as it describes him as ‘a cartwright’ much in the way the University Wits, and Henslowe when angry, referred to Ben Jonson as a ‘a bricklayer’. Although, as a writer Webster is associated with dark deeds and violent death because of his two great plays, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, there is nothing to suggest that he was a particularly depressed or gloomy person. He had been born into a comfortable household, his father being a successful coachbuilder (hence ‘cartwright’) and probably went to the Merchant Taylors School before being admitted to the Middle Temple to study law. The small body of work that has come down to us does suggest that he might well have had a reputation for writing slowly and with some difficulty, and it is unlikely that he could ever have made a good living only from plays, but then he did not need to for once he had qualified it seems he took over the legal and administrative side of the family firm, leaving his father and brother to see to its practical side.
The White Devil, the first of the two famous tragedies both based on real events, was first performed during the winter of 1611–12 at the Red Bull theatre, Webster choosing that particular playhouse because he rated the company’s young leading actor, Richard Perkins, very highly indeed. He actually mentions him in the published postcript to the play: ‘In particular I must remember the well-approved industry of my friend, Master Perkins, and confess the worth of his action from beginning to end.’ This was the first time any actor had been so honoured, including Alleyn or Burbage. But, Perkins apart, it was not a particularly good choice of venue for the Red Bull has been described as ‘a rowdy house with a vulgar audience’, although in fact it was more what we would describe today as a neighbourhood theatre, providing popular fare for local people. It also presented all kinds of spectacles, such as firework displays and pageants, supplementing its income by hiring out costumes and properties.
Unsurprisingly therefore, given the play’s complexities, it was not a success. ‘Ignorant asses’ is how Webster described his audience at its first performance. M.C. Bradbrook suggests that at least he could console himself with the thought that in the previous year Ben Jonson’s second attempt at Senecan tragedy, Catiline, had fallen just as flat as his Sejanus had some years earlier. Possibly it was The White Devil that prompted Fitzjeffrey’s catty poem for he finished it:
But what care I, it [the play] will be so obscure
That none shall understand him I am sure.
The reception he received for The Duchess of Malfi, however, a year or so later was very different, not least because this time his play was performed by the King’s Men in the Blackfriars Theatre and to a far more sophisticated audience. It was chosen for production by John Hemings, and when Webster published the script he named the leading actors along with the parts that they played. John Lowin, now recognised as a leading actor, played Bosola; Burbage, the Duchess’s murderous brother, Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria; Henry Condell, the evil Cardinal of Aragon, and young Richard Sharpe, the Duchess. The part of Antonio, the Duchess’s steward who becomes her second husband, was played by William Osler, who died not long after its first production. The play proved popular right from the start, not only because it was put on in the right place to the right people, but because the story is a great deal less complicated and more accessible than that of the White Devil and its tragic heroine is so sympathetic. Crowds flocked to see it and as late as 1635 it was chosen for a command performance before King Charles and his Court.
During the winter of 1614–15 Webster’s father died, leaving his two sons a considerable estate. Edward Webster renewed the lease on the family property in February 1615 and John took out his ‘freedom by patrimony’ of the Merchant Taylors as he was now sufficiently well off to be able to afford his ‘Freedom of the City’, which enabled him to vote in the Common Council and enjoy coveted trading privileges. He wrote little for the theatre after this but did become involved in writing and putting on city pageants.
The decade from 1603 to 1613 was to see some of the very finest Jacobean plays. From Shakespeare, after Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest were still to come along with the lesser Timon of Athens, Pericles and Cymbeline, and it is now generally agreed that he collaborated with John Fletcher on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Ben Jonson’s great Volpone also had its first production in 1606 and was followed later by The Alchemist, not to mention the work of Middleton, Dekker, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher and the rest. But over and above it all, especially towards the end of that period, there is a sense of fragmentation, that the theatrical world as it had been known was beginning to break up.
On 3 July 1613 Sir Henry Wotton sat down and wrote a letter to his nephew, Sir Edmund Bacon, informing him of a dramatic event which had taken place four days earlier on 29 June:
Now to let matters of State sleep, I will entertain you at present with what hath happened this week at the Bank’s side. The King’s Players had a new play called All is True, representing the principle [sic] pieces of the reign of Henry VIII which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order with their Georges and Garters, the Guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth, within a while, to make greatness very familiar if not ridiculous.
Now King Henry, making a masque at Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain chambers [cannon] being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff wherewith one of them was stuffed, 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 [of gunpowder], consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein 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 provident wit, put it out with bottle ale.7
Burbage must have thanked Providence that he had acquired the Blackfriars since he was now able to transfer his entire operation over the river. The sharers immediately made plans for a new theatre. The new and improved Globe rose from the ashes of the old within a year, at a cost of £1,400, and was described by John Chamberlain in a letter dated 30 June 1614 as ‘the fairest that ever was in England’.
It was also that same year that Shakespeare made his last major property purchase, a smart house in Blackfriars, which seems somewhat strange as he was now spending more and more time in Stratford to the point where John Fletcher had virtually taken over from him as resident dramatist of the King’s Men. The Blackfriars property, a large dwelling, was conveyed to him on 10 March of that year at a cost of £140, of which he put £80 down as a deposit, the balance of £60 to be paid off as a mortgage. The Conveyance Deed according to the relevant documents tell us that the ‘dwelling house, shops, cellars, sollars, plot of ground and singular other the premises above, by the presents mentioned, to be bargained and sold and every part and parcel thereof with the appurtenances, unto the said William Shakespeare and William Johnson, John Jackson and John Hemmings’.8
The three men were his sureties for his mortgage. Hemings, as we know, was his friend and fellow sharer in the King’s Men, Jackson was a city merchant and Johnson the landlord of the actors’ favourite tavern, the Mermaid. They were never called on to honour their guarantees for Shakespeare paid off his mortgage in full and on time. He then created a trusteeship for his London property which, on his death, was to be sold off on behalf of his family with the profits going to them. A very different picture, this, from the position in which the hardworking and prolific Thomas Dekker found himself and who, at the same time, was arrested for debt and spent the next three years in and out of debtors’ prisons.
Yet another sign of the passing of an era was the death, two years later, of Robert Armin, the last of the great clowns for whom Shakespeare had specifically written. At this point Ben Jonson, who must have had some realisation of what was happening and who alone among his contemporaries saw his work as something for posterity, collected together his best poetry and existing play texts and in 1616 had them published in a Folio edition. King James, recognising his status as poet and dramatist, awarded him a pension for life. The year 1616 also saw the death of Francis Beaumont. Whatever his relationship with Fletcher might have been, three years earlier he had married Ursula, heiress to Henry Sly of Sundridge in Kent. There were two daughters of the marriage, the younger, Frances, born posthumously. Beaumont died on 6 March 1616, the cause unknown, but he achieved burial in Westminster Abbey.
His death, however, was totally overshadowed by that of another, for on 23 April, Shakespeare died at his home in Stratford. His father had died in 1601, his mother in 1608, both having reached a decent age, but their children, with the exception of their daughter Joan, were not long-lived. Gilbert had died in 1612 at the age of forty-five and Richard the following year at the age of thirty-nine. Death was also taking its toll elsewhere. Shakespeare had named his twins Hamnet and Judith after his friends the Sadlers, and in 1614 Judith Sadler died as did another old friend, John Combe, who is buried next to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church.
It is ironic that Shakespeare, who had so successfully avoided scandal while living in a hotbed of it in London, was to find himself embroiled in a local one only weeks before his death. On 10 February 1616 Judith Shakespeare, now aged thirty-one and considered an elderly spinster, finally married Thomas Quiney. The couple were married at Holy Trinity Church but were then immediately summoned to appear before the consistory court in Worcester for marrying without a proper licence. Quiney refused to attend and was promptly excommunicated; no mention is made as to whether or not Judith suffered the same fate. The problem arose because a special licence was needed for Lent weddings and although the banns had been properly called for three weeks, no such licence had been applied for. But worse was to come.
There is a possible reason for such sudden haste to the wedding. While supposedly courting Judith in what can only be described as a leisurely fashion, Thomas had been involved in an affair with a young woman called Margaret Wheeler who was now having his child. The proper and expected thing for him to do was to marry her, not Judith. But he chose not to, possibly because he was aware of the advantages of marrying into a well-off family, and marriage to Judith would release him from this obligation. Poor Margaret, after suffering a difficult pregnancy, died in childbirth along with her baby a month after the marriage. They were buried on 15 March.
This time Quiney was summonsed before an ecclesiastical court especially set up to deal with cases of ‘whoredom and uncleanness’ (popularly known as ‘bawdy courts’), and he appeared before it on 26 March confessing to having had carnalem copulacionem, carnal copulation, with ‘the said Wheeler’ and was sentenced to the usual punishment for such an offence: to perform open penance, dressed in a white sheet, before the church congregation for three Sundays in a row. Unusually, and possibly due to his father-in-law’s influence, this was commuted to paying a fine to the parish and acknowledging his crime, fully dressed, before the minister of Bishopton Chapel. Not surprisingly a marriage off to such a poor start was doomed from the outset.
In January, Shakespeare had called in his friend, the lawyer Francis Collins, and drafted his will, which was substantially altered in March, possibly as a result of Judith’s marriage, signing that he was at that time ‘in perfect health and memory’. A host of causes, all surmise, have been suggested as the cause of his death: that he died, variously, of alcoholism, Bright’s disease, exposure after sleeping a night under a crab-apple tree (!), typhus, cholera, paralysis, epilepsy, apoplexy, arterio-sclerosis, excessive smoking, angina pectoris, pulmonary congestion and syphilis. The best-known one, which has something of the ring of truth, is that put forward by a later vicar of Stratford, the Revd John Ward, in 1662 and might well have still been extant locally. ‘Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seemed drank too hard for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.’9
It is quite possible to believe that the three met up in Warwickshire that spring; indeed the Bell Inn at Welford just outside Stratford claims to be the meeting place. Drayton, now an established poet, lived in Nuneaton, an easy day’s ride away, while Jonson took any opportunity to call on friends out of town. To this day local tradition has Shakespeare either walking back home along the path beside the Avon, which still exists, or riding back on horseback along the Evesham road. Either way he is said to have become thoroughly soaked. If this was the case and if, as was probable, he had retired to Stratford exhausted and drained from his vast output of work, then he might indeed have died of ‘pulmonary congestion’, in other words, pneumonia.
The Burial register reads: ‘1616 April 25. Will Shakespeare, gent.’ His position in the town entitled him to be buried inside the church within the chancel rail and it is for his standing in the local community, not his reputation as a playwright and poet, that he lies where he does. He is said to have been buried seventeen feet down but this is hardly possible so close to the River Avon. He is also credited with writing his own epitaph:
Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To dig the duste encloased here;
ET
Blest Be Y Man YU spares thes stones
And curst be he Y moves my bones.
An entire industry has grown up around his epitaph alone and constant requests have been made to open up the grave in the hope that by so doing his authorship might in some way be ‘proved’. But those who still prefer to believe that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare have never been able to explain how he was able to fool the actors among whom he worked for the best part of a quarter of a century, during which time he also lived among and mixed with all the other playwrights of the day from Marlowe through Jonson to Middleton and Fletcher. Or why, in his will, he left to ‘my fellows’ John Hemings, Henry Condell and Richard Burbage ‘a peece [that is money] to buy them rings’. Not to mention Ben Jonson’s poetic tribute to him as ‘Soul of our age!, the applause! the wonder of our stage!’, telling how he outshone Lily, ‘sporting Kyd and Marlowe’s mighty line’. That he will stay alive so long as his works live:
Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage.
Prospero had finally left his magic island, abjured his ‘rough magic’, broken his staff, drowned his books and set the creatures of his imagination free. He had nothing more to say.