Let’s Bear Us Like the Time
For a split second we almost see him. The Thames has frozen over in the midwinter of 1607; people stroll to and fro across the icy platform of tents, improvised barbers’ shops, taverns and wrestling booths: so firm does the surface seem that they even start fires on it to keep warm. It’s perhaps a little like the South Bank now, with its contortionists’ acts and hucksters and hot dog stalls. Shakespeare looks up momentarily, searching for a metaphor for an early speech of Coriolanus, and uses what he can see: the citizens of Rome will be
no surer, no,
Than is the coal of fire upon the ice
Or hailstone in the sun.
That is to say, ice may last longer than a fire, though sun outlives the hail: he never just describes, but always draws an apt and antithetical conclusion. Then, on New Year’s Eve, a melancholy bell rings out across the ice. Shakespeare is generally playing at court at Christmas, an important time of year for his company. This time he has broken off because of bad news: his brother Edmund has died. The burial is in Southwark, prefaced by this ‘fore-noon knell of the great bell’ (a line Shakespeare could have improved); he probably paid the twenty shillings for the bell himself. He was moving crossways through the crowd that day, at that most frustrating right-angle: people would have been going across the frozen river as he followed the little funeral procession along its southern edge to St Saviour’s. He might have been alone.
Edmund Shakespeare is one of history’s lost figures, but his proximity to another great mystery means that somebody is probably working somewhere on a speculative biography of him. If so, it will be a fine example of making bricks without straw. We know that Edmund was an actor by profession and that he followed William to London, but that’s all, so it’s tempting to think he may not have made much of a success, but then who knows? What does speak to us about him is that like William he suffered that worst bereavement, the loss of a child: his son, also Edmund, had perished four months before him. The Register describes the boy as ‘base born’ and no marriage is recorded: no doubt he was begot in the ‘lusty stealth of nature’ approved by his and his father’s namesake, the bastard Edmund in Lear, a character who also rails at the epithet ‘base’ – this is an odd tangled-up half-connection made by a writer looking for names that half-suit his characters. The one death surely expedited the other, and any biographer will no doubt start from that point.
Shakespeare’s brushes with mortality have by this time been, in our terms, many; in his, comparatively few. He’s lost a seven-year-old sister, Anne, when he was fourteen, his son Hamnet when he was thirty-two, his seventy-year-old father when he was thirty-six, and now a brother; and in the next year his mother is to die, like his father at a ripe-ish old age. But two months after Edmund’s death, in February 1608, William becomes a grandfather for the only time during his lifetime when Susannah has a little girl of her own, Elizabeth – to be baptised, like her grandfather, uncles and aunts, in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Not so long after this he sets about The Winter’s Tale, in which Hermione’s baby Perdita survives being left on the mountainside: the Old Shepherd sums up the situation to his son, who has just seen the loyal Antigonus perish, with heartfelt Shakespearian simplicity:
Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new born…
Perdita grows up and is reunited with Hermione; Hermione is reconciled to Leontes (though, like Viola and Isabella, she remains silently ambivalent about it). Shakespeare, losing interest in his cat and mouse games with King James and in romantic passion as well, is now, with very few exceptions, allowing uncompromised love only into dispersed families and their impossible reunions. Though Mamillius is truly dead, in other ways this late period of Shakespeare’s work is to be one of counterfeit losses and second chances. In The Tempest Ariel sings to Ferdinand about his father’s death by drowning, even though Ariel knows that he is still alive:
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made
– and in the co-authored Pericles, Shakespeare resoundingly announces his presence when the hero buries his wife at sea soon after she’s given birth, not suspecting that she’s alive and will survive:
A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear;
No light, no fire; the unfriendly elements
Forgot thee utterly; nor have I time
To give thee hallow’d to thy grave, but straight
Must cast thee, scarcely coffin’d, in the ooze;
Where, for a monument upon thy bones,
And aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water must o’erwhelm thy corpse,
Lying with simple shells…
When loss is experienced so expressively, perhaps what has gone can be restored, and death itself defeated.
Well, if only. Shakespeare will soon be on his way back to Stratford, to face, among other things, the inevitable. His cue to leave London – in one version of events at least – was nothing if not theatrical. If he’d ever written a scene in which a playhouse was burned down, he would perhaps have done it by having Will Kempe run on with his trousers on fire, trying to put out the flames with a bottle of ale. Exactly so: during a 1613 performance of Henry VIII (a play you might think rather difficult to ignite), a spark from one of the cannons being used to accompany the elaborate scene in which Henry puts on a masque at Wolsey’s house blew onto the theatre’s thatched roof and up it all went. The sad event contained a Shakespearian paradox, because the Globe had always been a fire risk: the anxious shareholders, including Shakespeare himself, had countenanced a false economy at the time of its building, and not given its roof the superior-quality thatch they had enjoyed at The Theatre.
According to an onlooker, Sir Henry Wotton (a diplomat with a pleasantly modern turn of phrase), the conflagration didn’t at first trouble the audience:
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…
There was only one near-casualty:
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.
Providence was also at work in that the company’s costume store and scripts all survived – luckily for us. The rebuilt Globe would open in a year, but without Shakespeare as a shareholder. As if on cue, he had sold up and retired to Stratford.
Or had he? You can, as so often in this private life of his, choose your fiction: at the very moment we seem to find him, alternatives arise. Had he already gone?Was he commuting, more or less, and did he personally see the Globe go up in flames? How much time Shakespeare spent in Stratford is forever unclear, though he turns up in the official records there more often from 1609 onwards. During these last few years his family were going over like ninepins: following Edmund and his mother, his brother Gilbert the glover died in 1612 and brother Richard (of whom nothing at all is known and who therefore achieves a sort of Shakespearian ideal) the year after that. However, his sister Joan outlived him by thirty years – the Shakespeare family are a mixture of predictable fragility and, especially among the women, surprising longevity. His daughters made up for Hamnet’s premature loss as best they could: Susannah died at sixty-six (in 1649, the year of Charles I’s execution); and Judith at seventy-seven, in 1662, having just seen the Restoration in.
The deaths would have been good enough reasons for Shakespeare to be occupied in Stratford. His mother’s estate needed settling, and then those of Gilbert and Richard. In 1610 he bought another twenty acres of land. He features in local disputes, discussions about highway repair, and somewhat notoriously in the tangled tale of the Welcombe enclosures, when, after a disastrous fire, landowners such as he sought to enclose arable land, depriving the larger community of its traditional right to cultivate and forcing up the price of grain. In the ensuing row he assiduously sat on the fence, so to speak, and even managed to exact some compensation for giving up his ‘right’ to enclose his own territory. So the hand that wrote that ‘distribution should undo excess’ knew how to sign up in its own interests; the half of his brain that sent the citizens in Coriolanus after their rations continued to confront the other, which viewed powerless people as fickle and undeserving. Shakespeare is not the only great writer with a cupboard clattering with small skeletons, but he achieves exceptional subtlety in his handling of them: in one speech in Coriolanus the First Citizen denounces noblemen who hoard grain that should be feeding hungry mouths – the very thing that Shakespeare had always done, evading the authorities, in Stratford.
As so often, he conspires in the confusion about his whereabouts, as if warning us off – or perhaps exercising the lifelong tendency to duck and weave of the recusant Catholic. He even buys a gatehouse in Blackfriars in 1613, close to the theatre there and across the river from the Globe – an odd thing to do if he was settling back into Stratford life. This was his first investment in London property after a lifetime of lodgings in Shoreditch, Bishopsgate and Southwark. Teasingly enough, the gatehouse – full of back doors, secret passages and escape routes – had previously been used as a bolthole for Catholic priests (men like the despised Garnet referred to in Macbeth), and in fact Shakespeare would soon lease some of its rooms to one of the priests’ sons.
Now does my project gather to a head,
My charms crack not, my spirits obey, and time
Goes upright with his carriage. How’s the day?
– The Tempest
Before the Globe fire Shakespeare had already produced what is generally thought to be his last solo-authored work, The Tempest – but surely not for that theatre: with its special effects, it has Blackfriars written all over it. The new facilities would have served the play wonderfully. It opens with a shipwreck more realistic than that of Twelfth Night; Ariel, dressed as a harpy, conjures up a banquet from thin air; spirits morph into dogs. There are identifiable pauses for music and candle-trimming: the stage direction that has Ariel and Prospero re-enter to start Act Five immediately after they have closed Act Four is unique in Shakespeare and strongly suggests an interlude in between. There is even, in the new fashion, a masque of goddesses, to our taste something of an embarrassment.
The Tempest can be safely assigned to 1610–11, because for once Shakespeare imports recent news into the play without coding his references. The Virginia Company was attempting to create a colony in the Americas, complete with four hundred colonists, to be named Jamestown after the King. The ship transporting them had been lost on the ‘Isle of Devils’ in the Bermudas; but survivors miraculously turned up a year later with their repaired ship and stories of contented occupation – seas replete with fish, skies full of birds and forestfuls of boars. Indeed a handful preferred to stay on in the Bermudas rather than continuing to Virginia, living the Utopian life verbalised by Gonzalo in the play.
So Shakespeare had been reading the papers all right. In fact, where once you could sense him in the library in an inkstained hurry, you now get quite a strong feeling of a man heavier, more corpulent, more respectable, but his eyes bright and alert as ever, shooting the breeze with various court contacts and casting around for a new story with, if anything, a livelier interest now he is not under such pressure to keep producing material for his company. One can imagine him in the Garrick Club at lunchtime today. The Tempest is the last of only three plays (after the Dream and Love’s Labour’s Lost) without a direct literary source, but, unlike them, with a very evident topical one which he hasn’t troubled to disguise.
The play has proved extraordinarily suggestive in ways that may or may not have been in the author’s mind. It is about imperialism; such is its sense of confinement that it works superbly when performed by longterm prisoners; it is Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. But whatever else he may have intended, he describes Prospero’s island, which many have been eager to take as a symbol, in precise and various natural detail. Prospero’s slaves, Caliban and Ariel, so often mused upon as externalisations of his own personality, are, for sure, autonomous, forthright beings – Caliban murderously hauling around his ‘burden of wood’ in thunder and lightning, Ariel querulous with administrative overwork. Everything fanciful is carefully grounded in the mundane. There is a real sense of hurry and shortness of time: Peter Brook once suggested that Prospero should be acted as if he knew he had a brain tumour and twenty-four hours in which to set his affairs in order. The unities of time and place are observed as closely as they were in The Comedy of Errors, a Shakespearian lifetime ago, and these are the two shortest plays in the canon as a result. To make a literal narrative so full of metaphysical implication, its actual tempest reflecting a mental one, demonstrates that Shakespeare is on full song.
What Pericles called ‘the rapture of the sea’, ever present in the late plays, crashes into this one at its start; with the daring of experience, Shakespeare immediately allows a petty quarrel to break out between the sailors trying to save the ship sinking near Prospero’s island and the aristocrats they are preserving, who don’t like their language. An uncanny silence follows the storm, with Prospero and his daughter Miranda watching from the shore – you can see the unnatural brightness, the freshened sky, feel the tang in the air and hear the distant subsiding waves. Shakespeare then takes the exceptional risk of having Prospero deliver nearly two hundred lines of explanatory backstory; but he also has the cunning to make Miranda’s attention wander a little from time to time, as an ironic comment on his stagecraft as well as on her father’s garrulousness.
It seems that as Duke of Milan, Prospero withdrew from office and, intent on self-improvement, lived in a world of books – ‘dukedom large enough’ for him. He became so rapt in ‘secret arts’ that he was content to let his brother Antonio – a man he immodestly describes as
The ivy which had hid my princely trunk
And suck’d the verdure out on’t
– run the state; he was then outraged to find that Antonio wanted recognition for his work. Antonio made a political alliance with the King of Naples – whom Prospero describes as ‘an enemy to me inveterate’ without explaining why – which gave him the confidence formally to unseat Prospero. Not to kill him, since the people appear to have loved this harmless scholar, but to put him out to sea in ‘a rotten carcass of a boat’ in the hope that he would drown. Thus has a poor academic been betrayed by wicked politicians, a father cruelly cast to sea with his baby in his arms (no mother, as usual). Rumour doesn’t report whether the change of government was an improvement for the Milanese.
Prospero’s and Miranda’s survival is due to the kindly offices of the one courtier well inclined, the philosophical gasbag Gonzalo, who has smuggled ‘stuffs and necessaries’ to them; and here they are, installed on the island, where Prospero has perfected his occult arts and singlehandedly created the storm. This will bring his enemies – the shipwrecked Antonio, the King of Naples, his nobles and their servants – into his circle of magical influence, where he has a somewhat obscure design upon them, compounded of mysticism and political advantage:
I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence,
If now I court not but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop.
The play duly follows the process of exhausting them into submission by magic spells and general debilitation. Ferdinand, the King of Naples’s harmless son, is thoroughly punished for falling in love with Miranda by being made to haul logs, thereby mirroring the hard labour imposed on Caliban; Antonio and the King’s brother Sebastian develop a plan to murder the King and take power but are foiled; the King’s butler Stephano and his jester Trinculo cruelly bribe Caliban – the island’s natural owner and the only one in rhythm with its nature – into a plot to murder Prospero, but fail through general ineptitude. Prospero behaves throughout like a vengeful autocrat, often watching from above in what a contemporary property list describes as ‘a robe for to go invisible’.
Rather than his own convictions, it is eventually the ‘airy spirit’ Ariel – who like Caliban has been coerced into serving him – who stops Prospero in his tracks, suggesting that his heart would be moved to pity if he saw the current disarray of the King and his followers:
PROSPERO: Dost thou think so, spirit?
ARIEL: Mine would, sir, were I human.
PROSPERO: And mine shall.
So, a master taught by his servant, Prospero suddenly decides to forgive:
Hast thou which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply
Passion as they, be kindlier mov’d than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury
Do I take part. The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.
It is the first time in the play he has listened to anything other than his own internal grievance: suddenly he is transformed into an angel of forbearance. Overwhelmed with compassion, he becomes the kind of prophet who comes down from the mountain with a message everyone is already familiar with: obviously it’s always better to ‘let go’, as we would call it now, than to drive yourself mad with Schadenfreude. However, his new idea depends for its impact on a contrition from his enemies which is not altogether forthcoming. Pardoned, Antonio retreats into silence, acknowledging Prospero’s gesture not at all, perhaps even despising it as he accepts good luck as his due. And so the play returns to the status quo from which it grew in the first place, though we only joined the story, so to speak, in the second: Prospero regains his temporal power, Antonio continues to hate him. Not much has changed.
So as an exemplary tale The Tempest lacks force – its virtues really lie elsewhere. The language is effortlessly beautiful, insouciantly delivered, and everything to do with the father and daughter is precisely realised, as are Ariel’s lovely songs and curiosity about the mortals (more gentle than was Puck’s), and much of Caliban, who, though he would cheerfully rape Miranda, can also spot a jay’s nest and knows how to ensnare the nimble marmoset. There is even a little comedy of manners as the aristocratic Ferdinand, newly shipwrecked and encountering Miranda, tries to woo her as if she were a sophisticated court lady, rather than a creature of nature who’s never seen a man other than her father before:
Most sure the goddess
On whom these airs attend! Vouchsafe my prayer
May know if you remain upon this island…
On the other hand the lords, both good and bad, are drearily underwritten, and the comedy duo of Trinculo and Stephano, after a promising start, is highly resistible – drunken bullies and knaves. Perhaps as a result the play has a slightly broken-backed effect, and its reputation is strangely neutral: it has always held the stage, yet few people profess profound affection for it. The most distinguished productions have veered away from its ceremonial, masque-like elements into a realistic, hard-driving account of revenge and its relinquishment. And as you may have been noticing, I have a little difficulty with Prospero himself. I have twice been asked to play the part and shied away from it each time, largely out of puzzlement at the play. On both occasions the director suggested that The Tempest is a mystery that we would somehow solve together; this is normally a welcome offer to the leading actor, but both times I immediately lost my enthusiasm: with this play I would rather have a director with a firm concept calling the shots.
I am really not sure what we are supposed to feel about Prospero. Is there any moral difference between him and the unseen ‘foul witch’ Sycorax, who, banished from Algiers with her unborn Caliban, took over the island till Prospero too usurped it? What right does he have to feel wronged and did he perhaps deserve to lose his job in Milan? His folly may not have been as extreme as Lear’s in dividing his kingdom, but he has certainly abrogated his privileged office, and Antonio’s revenge is less malign than that of Goneril and Regan. Prospero’s spiritual journey to all-forgiving mercy (and the resumption of temporal power) has a distinct smack of self-righteousness. On the other hand, for an audience to conclude that he has learned nothing and remains an inefficient leader about to fumble the reins again seems un-Shakespearian (at this end of his career in particular): it leaves us as flat as a production of Measure for Measure that sees the Duke as no more than a ruthless manipulator. Compared to Lear’s appalled realisation that he has ‘ta’en too little care of this’ or that the furred gowns of politicians hide all manner of vices, Prospero’s journey seems negligible; similarly, where Leontes bitterly repents, Antonio doesn’t even begin to.
Still, the play has enough of allegory about it to suggest – at least in the reading – that we should be drawing some conclusions. Perhaps forgiveness is better for you from a purely practical perspective than undying hatred: in Hamlet’s words, nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so. The Tempest is about ways of dealing with the past, and not necessarily from a Christian point of view; historic grudges are not so much come to terms with as put aside. We all feel better about ourselves when the spirit of forgiveness washes over us, even if what it is appeasing remains dormant and unresolved. Prospero’s mercy, compromised and secular, is an old man’s urge – Shakespeare’s too perhaps – for an easier life, a bargain for peace with himself, a way of surviving.
Theatrically, of course, the character is interesting just because of these ambiguities. Sun and shadow play on him by turns. He is a tiresome, self-pitying despot but he does have the range to see that
we are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep
– and then, astonishingly, to visualise the invisible, as if he were Oberon, or Mercutio imagining Queen Mab:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye, that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; ye demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid –
Weak masters though ye be – I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war…
Maybe it’s not such a bad part. And fairly clearly there’s something in this more than Prospero. Naturally, the speech is often taken as a last message from Shakespeare, he whose words have moved mountains but who has also made the infinite intimate. He has always weaved theatre imagery into the plays – it is the closest he gets to autobiography; he is now so confident that he does it through a disappointed, vindictive recluse. If he is addressing us personally, his alias is very self-mocking.
It is not only Prospero who releases the play from its self-imposed limits. The experience of living through inexplicable events itself draws the characters into a hesitant new community – not so much a late-play harmony as a guarded truce. And human complexity is a Pavlovian instinct in Shakespeare now, even when he is dealing in allegory with the other hand. Caliban can be violent and hateful, but it was Prospero who made him so by tricking and enslaving him; and the most vibrant poetry from the natural world, attuned to climate, topography and the seasons, is left to this slave, who alternates his talk of battering Prospero’s skull with an admission that he is so bewitched in his sleep by the island’s sounds and sweet airs that on waking he cries to dream again. And perhaps in the end the moral compass rests with the chess-players Ferdinand and Miranda, young people like Romeo and Juliet who teach their elders a new language or one they have forgotten; one which, like Henry V and Katherine, they have had to learn from each other without anybody’s help.
I come no more to make you laugh…
Be sad, as we would make ye.
– Henry VIII
As it turns out, Prospero’s magic staff is only half broken. From the last few years of Shakespeare’s life comes not the silence of a country retirement but some intriguing collaborations with the up-and-coming John Fletcher on Cardenio and The Two Noble Kinsmen, as if he were gracefully ushering in the King’s Men’s new house dramatist. Fletcher was used to collaborating – he had already brought the company a hit with Philaster, a tragi-comedy written with Francis Beaumont; but he also may already have written (alone) The Woman’s Prize or The Tamer Tamed, a sequel to The Taming of the Shrew in which Kate masters Petruchio. He and Shakespeare probably first worked together on the play that destroyed the Globe, Henry VIII, the Prologue to which dolorously warns us:
Things now
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high and working, full of state and woe,
Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow,
We now present.
The spectacle is to be so instructive that the Prologue predicts that if any of it were to raise a smile, why then
A man may weep upon his wedding day.
It is difficult to consider the ensuing play as being as tragic as all that – in fact it ends on a somewhat forced fanfare to the future – but still this is to be a far cry from the variegated light cast on the nation in Shakespeare’s earlier Histories. There’s no more effortless mixing of comedy and tragedy, no Falstaff, no Michael Williams, no Jack Cade, no troubled jailers, worried uncles or perceptive citizens, only a few Shakespearian spasms: a limp conversation between three Gentlemen about French fashions, a rough and tumble description of London’s citizens overwhelming the police at the baby Elizabeth’s christening:
Bless me, what a fry of fornication is at door… this one christening will beget a thousand
– and a rather saucy exchange between the innocent Anne Boleyn and an Old Lady in which the racier critics have spotted a unique Shakespearian reference to fellatio. Such are the set pieces Shakespeare was perhaps called in to provide; another being his well-known Queen in the Dock Speech – here that of Queen Katherine, similar to but more pugnacious than that of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.
But how one wishes, tackling this clotted account of Henry’s divorce of Katherine of Aragon in favour of Anne Boleyn and the decline and fall of Cardinal Wolsey, that the vitality and vernacular of the Henry IVs or even the Henry VIs had been directed into this more recent stretch of history – recent enough, it must be said, for warning posts to be staked out around it for the unwary dramatist. The issue of Henry VIII’s relations with Rome and with his wives was still sensitive; and in any case, for good political reasons, Shakespeare had never seemed entirely at ease referring unambiguously to contemporary events. Our problem when he does so, as here, is that often we half-get the point only to find it slipping away because of references to unfamiliar people we never meet, but who would have been well remembered at the time.
This is especially a pity since the themes are so promising: the figure of Wolsey, the overweening spin doctor who begins to take over the kingdom; the rights and wrongs of high taxation (17 per cent on the cloth trade); the sense that in divorcing Katherine Henry is simultaneously swayed by superstitious fear (all their sons have died), tormented by married love for her and infatuated with Boleyn. It is all matter for a passionate political drama: ten years earlier and left to himself Shakespeare would certainly have made something of it. The play does develop force towards the end, and a kind of transcendentalism as it approaches the death of the rejected Queen Katherine, who has a vision of figures in white with garlands, and the birth of the future Queen Elizabeth. At this point the writing becomes beautiful without exactly being moving, glistening and precious but without the deep urge for reconciliation to be found in other late Shakespeares. Like King John, Henry VIII has a sentimental smack that made it extremely popular in the nineteenth century: passages from Beerbohm Tree’s productions of both plays were filmed, though only John survives. The technological opportunities offered by Henry VIII would also have appealed to the Victorian public (Charles Kean’s production featured spotlights for the first time), and Henry Irving’s Lyceum audiences would specially have liked the many processions and ceremonies described in fatiguing detail in the text. This is like a story board for a movie rather than the rich hint of theatrical improvisation that animates Henry V (among the first Globe plays as Henry VIII is the last), in which
A crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million.
As for the offending cannon that burned down the theatre in 1613, it is not clear whether it was situated backstage for a sound effect (perhaps perilously close to the eaves) or was physically brought on; if, as seems likely, it was the latter, this was a thing Shakespeare, who used to conjure whole battles with words alone, would hardly have done at one time, so he was well hoist with his own petard.
The play is certainly quite dependent on its visual display. Its emotions – even those of Wolsey and Katherine – are elegantly protested rather than convincingly felt. There is one unexpectedly touching role, that of Griffith, a gentleman usher who persuades the dying Katherine to moderate her vindictiveness towards Wolsey, but he is fairminded rather than stirring. His is the play’s one positive judgment on the hated Cardinal; it is highly revisionist and a bit hopeful:
His overthrow heap’d happiness upon him;
For then and not till then he felt himself
And found the blessedness of being little.
Wolsey is redeemed only by this late report; we have seen him in his pomp, trying to inflict high taxes but defeated in his aim by Queen Katherine and negotiating Henry’s divorce from her – he succeeds in this but loses his place with the King in the process by leaking the news of the royal affair with Anne Boleyn. He is criticised remorselessly as a ‘butcher’s cur… this Ipswich fellow… holy fox… king cardinal… scarlet sin… bold bad man… of an unbounded stomach’. At the moment of his fall, Shakespeare allows a much more extended taunting of him by the other courtiers than he would have done in earlier days. Wolsey’s repentance is then long drawn-out and hard to believe – though the facile elegiac cadences of his farewell to greatness made a great impression on me when I was thirteen, so much so that I won a verse-speaking prize for performing it and even dressed up, I forget how, as the Cardinal, with an appropriate sad face to be photographed doing so.
In a play in which the Shakespearian energies have become reflective and studied, what comes off best, after Katherine’s defence, is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech over the infant Elizabeth I, in which her glorious future is predicted for those in the audience able to remember it. (Fortunately no one still living could have witnessed the fate of her mother Boleyn, swiftly executed by Henry, and his four further kingly marriages.) To achieve this, Shakespeare charmingly allows his Archbishop a godly prescience as he predicts that the child will live long, die a virgin and be succeeded by a yet more wonderful monarch – James I, who at a court performance would be sitting there watching the play. It may not be quite what the audience (at least its younger section who recalled Elizabeth from her decline) remembered from their own experience, but that’s show business. Her birth – her gender such a cause of vexation to her father that the Old Lady at first pretends to him that she is a boy – completes a panegyric circle connecting the monarch under whom Shakespeare grew up with his current royal audience.
This is where the play’s real urge – energetic propaganda – becomes evident once and for all. Henry VIII is subtitled All is True, which has to be a joke. There is one moment of literal authenticity: the actual trial of Katherine took place in Blackfriars Hall in 1529, and is now recapitulated in situ, as the Hall enclosed the new Blackfriars Playhouse. Nobody alive would remember this, though a grandparent might have told them about it; still, it would have had the same general frisson as watching Shakespeare’s Richard II deposed in Westminster Hall would have done. Elsewhere his adherence to historical fact is no more evident than it was in the earlier Histories. In those too, internal truths were sometimes skewed by expediency – as in the account of Richard III and Henry Tudor – but now expediency seems the writer’s main motive. The play’s music is that of reassurance, and its main purpose a morale booster, asserting Protestant values. This is Shakespeare as master-opportunist, the political trimmer who condemned the Jesuits in Macbeth; Henry VIII is the late gesture of a worldly and highly accommodating genius.
The fact is that air is definitely going out of the balloon. These late collaborations offer the wistful pleasure of seeing a great sportsman beyond his glory days or a star reduced by age to bit parts: the quality is still there but over a shorter distance. Cardenio disappeared, though it continues to be peered around for (a reconstruction of it was produced at the RSC in 2011). The Two Noble Kinsmen, first performed in 1613 at the Blackfriars as the Globe burned down, is another co-authorship with Fletcher in which Shakespeare’s voice is heard at some distance. This business of collaborating, unusual in a copyright-conscious age, is intriguing: how did they do it? Were the partners in the same room? Probably not. Who started an idea running? If Fletcher, how did he broach the matter (‘Sweet Will, I prithee…’); or if Shakespeare, whose opinion of his own work we know nothing about but whom we like to think of as a dear and modest fellow, did he quietly offer (‘Although it ill beseemeth me…’)?
The least credible possibility is that Fletcher would dismantle and rewrite what Shakespeare had already done, so we probably have all that intact. But then, Shakespeare may sometimes have started a theme off, then left its development to his colleague, as Rembrandt could to a pupil: this might explain the text’s lumpiness, half shining and half opaque. Except that Fletcher was rather more than a pupil, and certainly an apter collaborator than Wilkins, whose lurid imagination dominated much of Pericles in such an extreme contrast to the beautiful parts. Or, if part of Shakespeare’s job was to go over Fletcher’s work and streamline it, he was remarkably tolerant of the new man’s prolixity, because there much of it still is, albeit looking as if Fletcher was on good form that day. Perhaps Shakespeare was routinely respectful, in an old master’s way, to a new celebrity. Or perhaps the final result was of little concern to him.
Much of the eccentric pleasure of reading Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen is to compare very good writing with that of genius, as if in the middle of a Salieri piece Mozart were to burst through for a few bars. Scholars, armed with sophisticated variants of spell-searches, cherry-pick on the basis of image clusters to identify the passages they will like best to attribute to Shakespeare. Most theatre practitioners don’t really need such aids. If you’re used to swallowing Shakespeare whole and, in Old Hamlet’s words, letting him course through every gate and alley of the body, you’re likely to know that the Gentleman’s description in Henry VIII of the hysteria in the crowd gathering for Anne’s Coronation is his:
Such joy
I never saw before. Great-bellied women,
That had not half a week to go, like rams
In the old time of war, would shake the press,
And make ’em reel before ’em. No man living
Could say ‘This is my wife’ there, all were woven
So strangely in one piece.
Rhythmically, this is a little like Cymbeline. I would also put money on the line and a half from the King as he exits ‘frowning upon Wolsey’, his nobles smugly murmuring around him:
Read o’er this… and then to breakfast with
What appetite you have.
But I would have doubts about Buckingham’s comment on Wolsey:
No man’s pie is freed
From his ambitious finger
– and about the King’s choice of Blackfriars as a venue to discuss his divorce as ‘the most convenient place that I can think of’.
If the tale we have told
(For ’tis no other) any way content ye
(For to that honest purpose was it meant ye),
We have our end; and ye shall have ere long
I dare say many a better, to prolong
Your old loves to us. We and all our might
Rest at your service. Gentlemen, goodnight.
– Epilogue, The Two Noble Kinsmen
If, in Henry VIII, Shakespeare was mainly summoned for his specialities – wronged wives, vigorous low-life, a bad man’s repentance – then in The Two Noble Kinsmen the authorial contrasts are not quite so steep. In one way, the play has some Shakespearian continuity. Theseus’s and Hippolyta’s nuptials, inherited from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (to which the whole play is indebted – Chaucer was tremendously popular at the opening of the new century), have already been wryly investigated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now, in the new play’s first scene, they meet the ancient story line of Antigone: the wives of three of the victims of King Creon of Thebes appeal to Theseus to force Creon to allow them to bury their dead husbands. And Hippolyta’s part is much developed as a source of independent wisdom from the hints of it in the Dream.
For most of the new play Theseus has his hands full with a more time-consuming arbitration than that between Egeus and Hermia. He has to deal with the tragic-silly story of Palamon and Arcite, two nephews of Creon who have become his prisoners and who declare to each other:
PALAMON: Is there record of any two that lov’d
Better than we do, Arcite?
ARCITE: Sure there cannot.
They then glimpse the same girl (Emilia, Hippolyta’s sister) from their prison window, are immediately smitten with her, and, on the instant, become furious rivals to the death. However, their duel is enchantingly gallant: released and out in the woods, Palamon brings Arcite wine and a venison dinner to strengthen him for their battle, whereupon they fall to reminiscing about their shared past, drinking toasts to each other and
To the wenches we have known in our days.
After this they considerately arm each other for the fight (‘Do I pinch you? Is’t not too heavy?’) and lend each other pieces of their fighting equipment, oiling the whole mortal process with loving attentions. This is not some bizarre psychological displacement or a way of putting off the crucial moment: they devotedly feel such things must be done with love between two men separated by arbitrary sexual passion. The duel is daft, because neither lover can conceivably be thought to have wronged the other; their jealousy is not explored because it’s not really felt, or perhaps is buried too deep beneath noble thoughts. In a somewhat abstract way this conceit further ventilates the same-sex friendship of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and also the relationships in the Dream between Titania and the votaress who was mother to her little changeling boy and between Hermia and Helena – without the tension of the first play or the comedy of the second.
I’ve never been in The Two Noble Kinsmen but I assume it must be difficult to play; and its very sketchy stage history suggests uncertainty as to whether this central friendship should be taken as a Shakespearian tragedy manqué or a big joke. In writing about it I find my own fa cetiousness creeping in; in the playing that would be a soft comic option, a postmodernist cheat. The whole business was more likely seriously meant – except perhaps the fine moment when the two men discuss their beloved and Palamon breaks stately convention to say bluntly:
I saw her first.
Why are Palamon and Arcite so very fond of each other? They’re not brothers, they’re cousins; and they don’t half go on about it, finding in their affection strength enough to survive as prisoners of war – to survive everything, in fact, except sexual rivalry. Perhaps some new style is being felt for, in which the Chaucerian grace of two ‘parfit gentle knights’ is to combine with whimsicality, somewhat in the manner of Don Quixote. The idea that there is nothing more intelligent to be done about their situation than a big fight certainly tilts the play into the definition of comedy famously made by Henri Bergson – that it generally depends on human beings being reduced to behaving like automata. But it is also difficult not to like two friends who remain remorselessly cheerful while duelling each other to the death. In the end, the play makes an eccentric bid for tragic status – there’s a death, and a conclusion both beautiful and sombre, albeit prefaced by much masque-like ritual. For a last play it does not even attempt the rather shaky appeasements of The Tempest: it is more uncomfortable, less surefooted in the delivery but in its way more original.
The story of the two friends is not the only tragi-comic mélange in the play. It is thought that Shakespeare rather than Fletcher is responsible for developing a theme minutely hinted at in The Knight’s Tale: the, to us, more accessible story of the Jailer’s Daughter. Hers is a big part that surely deserved a name: but then so did the Duke in Measure for Measure and the King in Hamlet. Her narrative potential is never quite followed through, but arises from her having placed her father in mortal jeopardy by helping Palamon escape from prison. On the basis of one kiss from Palamon, she has become crazed with love for him:
Lord, the difference of men!…
To marry him is hopeless,
To be his whore is witless. Out upon’t!…
I love him beyond love and beyond reason…
I care not. I am desperate…
Let him do What he will with me, so he use me kindly,
For use me so he shall, or I’ll proclaim him.
In a series of soliloquies she becomes madder and madder along Ophelia’s lines, overwhelmed by fantasies:
O for a prick now like a nightingale
To lay my breast against. I shall sleep like a top else.
Some of the derangement is beautifully done, even if it somewhat outstays its welcome – Jacobean audiences never tired of seeing Bedlam imitated on the stage. She ends with a tenderly lubricious scene in which she accepts another anonymous figure, a ‘Wooer’, because he is disguised as Palamon; in an odd inversion of the bed-trick, they indeed go off together, she as anxious as when she first met Palamon to be used kindly:
JAILER’S DAUGHTER: But you shall not hurt me.
WOOER: I will not, sweet.
JAILER’S DAUGHTER: If you do, love, I’ll cry.
– and thence into their somewhat unusual marriage. You even feel she might be quite happy, since she knew little of the actual reality of Palamon in the first place.
Back in the main plot, meanwhile, lurks a treat still better than the prison scene in Cymbeline. Anyone who has longed for a brand new Shakespeare play in which every line is a surprise should give themselves the pleasure of reading Act Five of The Two Noble Kinsmen. In preparation for their struggle – a mortal outcome from a pin’s head of plot – Arcite prays to Mars:
Thou, mighty one, that with thy power hast turn’d
Green Neptune into purple;
Whose havoc in vast field comets prewarn,
Unearthed skulls proclaim, whose breath blows down
The teeming Ceres’ foison, who dost pluck
With hand armipotent from forth blue clouds
The mason’d turrets, that both mak’st and break’st
The stony girths of cities; me thy pupil,
Youngest follower of thy drum, instruct this day
With military skill, that to thy laud
I may advance my streamer, and by thee
Be styl’d the lord o’ th’ day.
Palamon then addresses Venus:
Our stars must glister with new fire or be
Today extinct…
Hail, sovereign queen of secrets, who hast power
To call the fiercest tyrant from his rage
And weep unto a girl, that hast the might,
Even with an eye-glance, to choke Mars’s drum
And turn th’ alarm to whispers, that canst make
A cripple flourish with his crutch and cure him
Before Apollo, that mayst force the king
To be his subjects’ vassal, and induce
Stale gravity to dance. The poll’d bachelor,
Whose youth like wanton boys through bonfires
Have skipped thy flame, at seventy thou canst catch
And make him to the scorn of his hoarse throat
Abuse young lays of love…
How do we know so surely that these speeches were written by Shakespeare? Or almost all of them: there’s a little strangeness in Palamon’s fifth and sixth lines, as if he were tolerantly leaving something unimproved. But there are echoes here of Prospero and Pericles and even Perdita: throughout you catch that inimitable timbre, the accumulating force, the glittering light. The same trick of making emotionally connected characters – Petruchio and Kate, Volumnia and Coriolanus – echo each other’s rhythm and diction; the repeated conditional clauses of Arcite, Palamon’s overhanging ‘induce’ with its swing into ‘stale gravity to dance’ (a dactyl surrounded by monosyllables), the operatic union of form and content: this is no weakening hand, no o’erthrown charms.
Emilia, object of Palamon’s and Arcite’s affections, then places a silver hind on an altar full of spices and sets it alight: it vanishes and a rose tree appears in its place, bearing one rose which then falls – all of it extending the mystery Emilia is seeking an answer to. She follows this masque magic with an account of the differences between the two men which is, suddenly, Shakespeare at his most observant – even if they are presented in ways which, it must be said, we’ve not really seen for ourselves:
Arcite is gently visag’d, yet his eye
Is like an engine bent, or a sharp weapon
In a soft sheath; mercy and manly courage
Are bedfellows in his visage. Palamon
Has a most menacing aspect; his brow
Is graved, and seems to bury what it frowns on;
Yet sometime ’tis not so, but alters to
The quality of his thoughts. Long time his eye
Will dwell upon his object. Melancholy
Becomes him nobly; so does Arcite’s mirth.
But Palamon’s sadness is a kind of mirth,
So mingled as if mirth did make him sad
And sadness merry.
Not only is Shakespeare improving on what we’ve seen, but I can hear Troilus and Cressida in the first, physical description, and Twelfth Night in the second, interior one. It is as good as anything he has done in this line.
The narrative suspense of the play’s denouement – a mix of Jacobean masque, an unflinching view of death and an unexpectedly horrible reversal – gives way to a remarkable final summary from Theseus:
Never Fortune
Did play a subtler game; the conquer’d triumphs,
The victor has the loss… O you heavenly charmers,
What things you make of us! For what we lack
We laugh, for what we have are sorry, still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That is above our question. Let’s go off
And bear us like the time.
This, which would have graced any late play, is a hymn not just to the gods above but to the god of dramatic plots; good advice not only to the human race, afflicted by heaven, but to an audience left to puzzle over Shakespeare’s lifelong hold on them. Easy as it is to believe that he was taking leave when Prospero broke his staff and drowned his book ‘deeper than did ever plummet sound’, it is here, in this oddity of a play, like a piano piece for two pairs of hands, that I really see him laying down his pen.
Imagination plays around the sketchy facts of Shakespeare’s approaching end, joining them up and blending them with fantasy. I vote, uncontroversially, that he’s back in Stratford, living a quieter life, among his ain folk, people he’s probably known all his life – far more celebrated among them as a local dignitary and a courtier of King James than for his plays. And rich – by now he’s been earning something like £250 a year, five times the annual wage of a schoolmaster such as his own Thomas Jenkins and twenty times that of the workmen who helped him build the Globe. Whether or not he’s been back much since he left Anne and the children here in the 1580s, he’s immortalised Warwickshire from a distance, continuing to use old Warwickshire spellings such as ‘scilens’ for ‘silence’, and giving Puck’s magic flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a pansy, its Warwickshire name, love-in-idleness. In As You Like It, he reimagined the real Forest of Arden – a thick swathe of woodland that, when he was growing up, stretched right across the Midlands north of Stratford, but which was now much deforested for building – as a newly mysterious place where you might meet not only a serpent but a good-natured lioness, sit under palm trees, have a drastic change of personality, see ‘books in the running brooks’ and ‘good in everything’. He’s even celebrated the wildflowers of Warwickshire:
rank fumitory and furrow weeds,
… hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.
But presumably he’s tired, with his own restless argument. I wonder if he ever, sitting in the pub with Stratford friends talking Stratford business, achieved the stoicism of Shallow and Silence in their Gloucestershire orchard in Henry IV Part Two. This is a scene that, in the faltering rhythms of the elderly, its shying away from the unknown into quotidian comforts and in its vivid invisible characters, once and for all proves that Shakespeare was not so much a literary man as someone who sat and earwigged other people’s conversations in alehouses:
SHALLOW: I was once of Clement’s Inn, where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet.
SILENCE: You were called lusty Shallow then, cousin.
SHALLOW: By the mass, I was called anything; and I would have done anything too, and roundly too. There was I, and little John Doit of Staffordshire, and Black George Barnes, and Francis Pickbone, and Will Squele, a Cotswold man: you had not four such swinge-bucklers in all the Inns of Court again… and I may say we knew where the bona-robas were, and had the best of them all at commandment… Jesu! Jesu! The mad days that I have spent! And to see how many of mine old acquaintance are dead!
SILENCE: We shall all follow, cousin.
SHALLOW: Certain, ’tis certain; very sure, very sure; death, as the Psalmist says, is certain to all; all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford Fair?
SILENCE: Truly, cousin, I was not there.
SHALLOW: Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?
SILENCE: Dead, sir.
SHALLOW: Jesu! Jesu! Dead! A’ drew a good bow; and dead! A’ shot a fine shoot: John of Gaunt loved him well, and betted much money on his head. Dead!… How a score of ewes now?
SILENCE: Thereafter as they be; a score of good ewes may be worth ten pounds.
SHALLOW: And is old Double dead?
And by tradition it’s after just one such night of drinking with fellow Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson (to one of whose children Shakespeare may have been godfather) that he got lost on his way home, contracted a fever, and slipped away from us, in his self-effacing way.
Or, again, did he? Alcohol doesn’t normally cause mortal fever – unless Shakespeare, reliving his memories of King Lear, threw off all his lendings on the road to become a naked wretch in the dead of night. The improbable theory was in fact put about by a vicar of Stratford in the 1660s – a man of God so unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s works, by the way, that he once made a note in his diary to peruse them in order not to seem ignorant to his parishioners. It was taken up much later by the playwright Edward Bond in Bingo, as a matter of dramatic opportunism: Shakespeare becomes ill in the Warwickshire snow (in April?), retires to bed muttering ‘Was anything done?’ and eventually takes poison supplied by Ben Jonson.
It is not the most startling of the Shakespeare death theories. Syphilis, about which he’d made so many jokes, has also been suggested, combined with writer’s cramp – a paralysis of the hand known at the time as ‘scrivener’s palsy’ that can indeed afflict an overworked scribbler. The night-out story has in turn generated the idea that Shakespeare was a heavy drinker, which seems most unlikely, even if the wilder feats of his imagination (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) might suggest to us, in our imaginative poverty, some pharmacological influence.
What is certain is that 1616 was a bad year for fevers in Stratford. It had been a warm, stormy winter, and next to Shakespeare’s house, New Place, ran a murky little stream perfect for the breeding of typhus. In the event, his funeral would follow hotfoot on his death, and he was buried unusually deep in the ground, both things suggesting a fear of infection. He may have reverted to the old faith on his deathbed and received extreme Catholic unction; together with the grace note about the Blackfriars priest’s hole, it’s an attractive idea, but no more reliable than any other.
His quiet departure from life – attended by whom? His doctor sonin-law John Hall presumably, among others – came only a month after, following various false starts, he’d signed off his will in the shakiest of hands. He left money to his sister Joan; his wife famously got the ‘second best bed’. That may not have been such a slight – Anne would have received a third of the estate by law anyway, and the second best bed was probably the matrimonial one, the best being kept for visitors. However, there is, to be sure, a certain frostiness in the phrasing. Susannah got almost everything else, significantly more than Judith. Shakespeare allowed nothing into this document – no revealing talk of who should have manuscripts or papers – that identifies him as a writer or casts any light at all on his work: this may have been characteristic or just customary, since small bequests were generally registered elsewhere. The only reference to his London life is a gift of money to Richard Burbage to buy a gold ring, for old times’ sake, and also to Heminges and Condell, with whom he may have started assembling the texts they would finally publish in the 1623 First Folio. Much as we would like to find a random comment that Macbeth was hell to write or that he never liked Will Kempe, there’s nothing anywhere by Shakespeare on Shakespeare – which of course is the void from which the authorship controversy starts.
Altogether it sounds like a humdrum, disagreeable few months coming after a less than soothing retirement, and Shakespeare will have needed all of Shallow’s and Silence’s stoicism. In 1613 his beloved Susannah, wife of Dr Hall and a pillar of the community, had had to defend herself (successfully, but these things stick) against a libel that she’d had an affair with a local haberdasher and contracted gonorrhoea. Only three months before Shakespeare’s death his other daughter Judith married Thomas Quiney, a young man from a family well known to the Shakespeares, but she did so during Lent without the special licence required to do so, with the result that both of them were excommunicated. Worse, a month before the marriage a girl who had been impregnated elsewhere by Quiney died, together with her baby. Quiney was brought to court and fined for fornication, and the scandal was out there for all to see. Shakespeare, who may have married Anne Hathaway all those years ago under duress, struck Quiney out of his will, and his bequest to Judith is staked out with cautious provisos. When the moment came, he would have been laid out to be viewed, embalmed and ‘wound’ with herbs and flowers. There was no great fuss about his funeral: strictly family and friends. I imagine a quiet procession, following part of the same route as for his baptism service, down Chapel Lane from his house and then right along the fields by the river to Holy Trinity Church. It was a dignified enough event – he was heading for a distinguished resting place in the chancel, where he would later be joined by Anne and Susannah. But for some reason I get the feeling of an overcast sky above the smallish procession; and in the churchyard, traversed countless times since by visitors and as a short cut to the theatre by actors living on the old, south side of town, a few daffodils coming before the swallow dares. I was once married in this church, you might say over Shakespeare’s dead body.
And it was happening in Stratford, not Westminster Abbey in the company of Chaucer and Spenser and later Ben Jonson, attended by all the West End crowd. A genius who minded his own business was returning to the silence he obviously preferred, leaving behind him the clamour of voices he’d given breath to like some great ventriloquist. Above his tomb in Stratford church stands a singularly unrevealing bust, stolid and humourless, which only suggests that you wouldn’t have wanted to cross him if you were a tenant farmer on his land. Carved by a Dutch neighbour in Southwark and presumably approved by the family, this is where you see the patrician Shakespeare, bald and self-satisfied, with the hint of a not very fair round belly: unlike the earlier earringed, slightly Semitic figure in the so-called Chandos portrait, or the dreary Droeshout engraving, which makes his head very big, as if a kid was drawing a picture of a brainy man. There’s precious little else to find. No image that has come down of Shakespeare is particularly helpful, but it hardly matters: his life was a prolonged act of self-effacement that has nevertheless left the world more vibrant.
Sweet William Shakespeare may of course have been a haughty and prickly man, silent out of pride not modesty. But the sneaking feeling won’t quite go away that all this would have made him laugh; that he was blessed with a real indifference, a belief that you owe nothing to the future. Compared to the flamboyance of Ben Jonson and the rock ’n’ roll manners of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s seems a wilfully obscure personality. And just as he once warned us not to interpret him through his works because his nature was
subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand
he took the time at the end of his life to write his own epitaph. It has a somewhat admonitory tone, as if from the pen of Timon of Athens:
Good friend, for Jesu’s sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here;
Blessed be the man who spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
That’s what he was afraid of: he knew that coffins were sometimes dug up if their tenant was felt to be a waste of space and the bodies thrown into the charnel house. The grave could then be used for someone more important. And even William Shakespeare of Stratford thought this could happen to him.