Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

  As always, Shakespeare had a special, grim reason to throw himself into a frenzy of work: one morning someone—it could be a lackey in an attic room or a great lady in her curtained bed—would wake up with the telltale buboes in the groin or the armpits. The plague would have announced its return, and in a matter of days or weeks the theaters would be shut down. It must have seemed crucially important to all of the company members always to be putting money in their purses, while there was money to be had. They could not afford to miss any occasion for profit, and, plague permitting, the regime of James I provided many occasions.

  Shakespeare and his company had not been forced to choose one venue or another and let the others slip away: they had not been frozen out of the new Scottish-dominated court; they had not alienated their London popular audience; they had not lost touch with the cities and towns where they would perform on tour. On the contrary, they had consolidated their grip on each of these key constituencies and were busily trying to add yet another venue. The plan did not originate with Shakespeare, but it must have become part of his long-term strategy. The strategy was to dominate the market—the market here being the performance of plays to the court and to the public at large, in London and in the provinces—or to come as close to doing so as possible.

  During the reign of Elizabeth, in 1596, the entrepreneur James Burbage (the father of the famous actor) paid six hundred pounds for property that had, until the dissolution of the monasteries, been part of a large friary, belonging to the order known as the Friars Preachers or Black Friars. The location was a desirable one: though it was within the city walls, it was a “liberty” and hence outside the jurisdiction of the city fathers. A theater had already been established twenty years earlier in one of the Blackfriars halls, where a succession of children’s companies had performed. But this enterprise had collapsed after eight financially troubled years, and the indoor theater had gone silent. The enterprising Burbage smelled a profit, if he could reopen it for performances by what was then the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He had built the Theater, one of England’s first outdoor playhouses; now, by reconstructing the hall where the children’s companies had played, he would open England’s first indoor playhouse for adult actors. The location was prestigious—not in the suburbs, hard by the bearbaiting arenas and execution grounds, but right in the heart of the city. The Blackfriars hall was much smaller than the Globe, but it had the great advantage, given the vagaries of the English weather, of being roofed and enclosed. It was, at least by comparison with the open amphitheaters, a place of decorum and even luxury. Disorderly crowds would not stand restlessly around the stage; instead, everyone would be seated. Hence admission prices could be greatly increased—from the mere pennies at the Globe to as high as two shillings in Blackfriars—and, as it was possible to illuminate the hall by candlelight, there could be evening as well as afternoon performances.

  Everything to do with the theater was a high-risk speculation, but given the popularity of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the scheme would probably have begun to pay off at once, had it not been for an unexpected complication: the neighbors found out about Burbage’s plan and vehemently objected. A petition was signed by thirty-one residents of the precinct, including Shakespeare’s printer friend, Richard Field, and the company’s own noble patron, the lord chamberlain himself, who happened to live in the same complex of buildings. They argued that the theater would be a traffic nightmare, that it would attract “all manner of vagrant and lewd persons,” that the crowds would increase the risk of plague, and, an all-but-irresistible clincher, that the players’ drums and trumpets would disrupt services and drown out sermons in nearby churches. The government blocked the reopening of the theater, and James Burbage soon after died. His death was probably not caused, as some have said, by a broken heart—in his late sixties, he had weathered many similar crises, and nothing in his career suggests that he had a sensitive heart. Still, anxiety about the huge investment must have clouded his last days and would certainly have preoccupied his heirs. The hall was rented out for forty pounds per year to the Children of the Chapel Royal—one of the companies of boy actors—so at least there was some income. But it was not until 1608, twelve years after the original investment, that the company, now the King’s Men, finally succeeded in performing in the Blackfriars Theater. The fact that they managed to do so, against deep-seated opposition, is a sign of how powerful they had become.

  It was James Burbage’s son, Richard, who brought his father’s plan to fruition. The brilliant actor, who created many of the great Shakespearean roles, proved to be a canny, resourceful, and tenacious businessman as well. Following the model of the Globe Theater, Burbage organized a syndicate to hold and administer the new playhouse. Its seven equal partners each held a one-seventh share in the Blackfriars playhouse for a term of twenty-one years. Shakespeare, already a sharer in the Globe, was one of the partners in the new venture, the culmination of an elaborate entrepreneurial strategy.

  The King’s Men were firmly established as the court’s favorite entertainers; they carried the royal stamp of favor upon them when they traveled; they attracted huge London audiences to their Bankside amphitheater, the Globe; and they would now cater as well to a more exclusive clientele at the Blackfriars, which could accommodate some five hundred higher-paying spectators. Gallants eager to show off their clothes could even pay to sit on the Blackfriars stage and become part of the spectacle. The practice—not permitted at the Globe—must have annoyed the actor in Shakespeare: later in the century a riot broke out during a performance of Macbeth when a nobleman slapped an actor who had remonstrated with him for crossing directly in front of the action in order to greet a friend on the other side of the stage. And it must have annoyed the playwright in him as well, since the stage-sitters could conspicuously get up and walk out during the play. But the businessman in Shakespeare must have found the extra profit irresistible.

  Somehow, in the midst of this frenzy of activity—the relocation of the Globe; the adjustment to the new Scottish regime; the recruitment of new actors; the rush of court performances; the learning of new roles; the exhausting provincial tours; the harried negotiations over the reopening of Blackfriars; and the hurried trips back to Stratford to see his wife and children, bury his mother, celebrate the marriage of his daughter, purchase real estate, and conduct petty lawsuits—Shakespeare also found the time to write. Small wonder that as early as 1604 he had begun to brood about retirement.

  To make retirement a viable option, it was not only a matter of accumulation and investment; the author of King Lear had to rethink his relation to the world. To judge from the plays, his mind was fantastically restless—“an extravagant and wheeling stranger,” as Othello is described (1.1.137). His imagination swooped from archaic Britain to contemporary Vienna, from ancient Troy to France’s Roussillon, from medieval Scotland to Timon’s Athens and Coriolanus’s Rome. The scene in the sprawling Antony and Cleopatra moves back and forth from the queen’s palace in Alexandria to Rome, with detours to Sicily, Syria, Athens, Actium, and assorted military camps, battlefields, and monuments. The strange play Pericles, which he co-authored with the very minor writer George Wilkins, is even more unmoored, shifting from Antioch to Tyre to Tarsus to Pentapolis (in what is now Libya) to Ephesus to Mytilene (on the island of Lesbos). It is as if, more than anything else, Shakespeare’s mind feared—or defied—enclosure.

  But the problem posed by retirement was not enclosure. “I could be bounded in a nutshell,” Hamlet says, “and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” (2.2.248–50). Shakespeare’s bad dream, or so at least King Lear suggests, had to do with a loss of power and the threat of dependency posed by age. As his career progressed, he shifted the principal focus of his plays away from ardent young men and women, impatient to get on with their lives, to the older generation. This shift is obvious in King Lear, with its tormented old men, but it can also be seen, though more subtly, in the c
haracter of Othello, who worries about his age, and in Macbeth, whose vitality ebbs away before our eyes:

  My way of life

  Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf,

  And that which should accompany old age,

  As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

  I must not look to have.

  (5.3.23–27)

  And instead of Romeo and Juliet or Rosalind and Orlando, as Shakespeare’s quintessential vision of what it means to be in love, he gives us “grizzled” Antony and his wily Cleopatra, “wrinkled deep in time” (3.13.16, 1.5.29).

  It will not do to force the point: Shakespeare’s last play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, which he probably wrote in 1613–14 with the playwright John Fletcher, fifteen years his junior, is a tragicomic story of young lovers. Another product of this collaboration, the lost Cardenio (based on a source in Don Quixote), was probably also about the perils and pleasures of youthful passion. But it is striking that The Two Noble Kinsmen contains a grotesque description of a very old man, as if Shakespeare were contemplating with a shudder what he feared might lie ahead:

  The agèd cramp

  Had screwed his square foot round,

  That gout had knit his fingers into knots,

  Torturing convulsions from his globy eyes

  Had almost drawn their spheres, that what was life

  In him seemed torture.

  (5.2.42–47)

  And, more significant, the greatest of these late plays, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, both have a distinctly autumnal, retrospective tone. Shakespeare seems to be self-consciously reflecting upon what he has accomplished in his professional life and coming to terms with what it might mean to leave it behind.

  From very early in his career, Shakespeare recycled and transformed what he had already tried out, but the ghosts of his past accomplishments haunt the late plays to an exceptional degree. The Winter’s Tale is a reworking in particular of Othello, as if Shakespeare had set himself the task once again of staging a story of male friendship and homicidal jealousy, but this time without any tempter at all. The effect is the most extreme version in his work of the radical excision of motive: there is no reason at all why King Leontes should suspect his beautiful wife, nine months pregnant, of adultery with his best friend; no reason why he should cause the death of his only son, order his newborn daughter to be abandoned, and destroy his own happiness; and there is no reason why he should, after sixteen years, recover the daughter and the wife whom he has believed long dead. The fatal madness comes upon him suddenly and without provocation; and the restoration takes the conspicuously irrational and dangerous form of magic: a statue brought to life.

  Where is Shakespeare in this strange story, a story lifted from his old rival Robert Greene? In part, he seems playfully to peer out at us behind the mask of a character he added to Greene’s story, the rogue Autolycus, the trickster and peddler and “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” (4.3.25–26). As a fragment of wry authorial self-representation, Autolycus is the player stripped of the protection of a powerful patron and hence revealed for what he is: a shape-changing vagabond and thief. He embodies the playwright’s own sly consciousness of the absurdity of his trade: extracting pennies from the pockets of naive spectators gaping at the old statue trick stolen from a rival. And if the spectacular finale is not simply a trick, akin to a cardsharp’s sleight of hand, if the playwright manages to give it an eerie power, then Shakespeare is somewhere else onstage, peering out from behind a different mask—that of the old woman who arranges the whole scene of the statue’s coming-to-life. There is something deliberately witchlike about the dead queen’s friend Paulina, for there is something potentially illicit about this resurrection, something akin to the black art of necromancy: “those that think it is unlawful business / I am about, let them depart” (5.3.96–97).

  A peculiar queasiness comes over the play’s end. It is as if not this one play alone but the whole of Shakespeare’s enterprise—the bringing of the dead to life, the conjuring up of the passions, the effacement of rational motives, and the exploration of secret places in the soul and in the state—were being called into question. Either it is a fraud, set up to extract money from the gullible, or it is witchcraft. If the audience stays in the theater, it is because of the wonder of the spectacle and because of the reassuring hope, articulated by Leontes, that its causes and effects are simply those of the ordinary world:

  O, she’s warm!

  If this be magic, let it be an art

  Lawful as eating.

  (5.3.109–11)

  And with this, the play moves quickly to its end, running just ahead of the mockery it knows is close behind: “That she is living,” says Paulina,

  Were it but told you, should be hooted at

  Like an old tale. But it appears she lives.

  (5.3.116–18)

  The Winter’s Tale hints, for those in the audience listening carefully enough to pick up the suggestion, that Leontes’ queen was not dead but that she lived hidden for sixteen years in a house that Paulina has visited “privately twice or thrice a day” (5.2.95). Nothing is made of the hint; it may be there to reassure spectators who might have been otherwise reluctant to applaud necromancy, but it is so brief that it is difficult to see how it could have worked in performance. Perhaps instead it was a personal reassurance, the playwright’s tiny superstitious note to himself, as if he were warding off the intimation that what he did was a form of magic.

  Shakespeare had revealed this intimation before, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth. Now, at the end of his career, he returned to it, at first playing with it obliquely in The Winter’s Tale and then finally facing it directly and embracing it. The protagonist of The Tempest is a prince and a powerful magician, but he is also unmistakably a great playwright—manipulating characters, contriving to set them up in relation to one another, forging memorable scenes. Indeed, his princely power is precisely the playwright’s power to determine the fate of his creations, and his magical power is precisely the playwright’s power to alter space and time, create vivid illusions, cast a spell. Shakespeare’s plays are rarely overtly self-reflexive: he wrote as if he thought that there were more interesting (or at least more dramatic) things in life to do than write plays. Though from time to time he seems to peer out, somewhere within Richard III or Iago or Autolycus or Paulina, for the most part he keeps himself hidden. But at last in The Tempest, he comes if not directly to the surface, then at least so close that his shadowy outline can be discerned.

  The Tempest is not, strictly speaking, Shakespeare’s last play. Written probably in 1611, it was followed by All Is True (now more often called Henry VIII), The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio. But none of these latter plays is a wholly personal vision; each was written in collaboration with John Fletcher, whom Shakespeare seems to have handpicked as his successor as principal playwright for the King’s Men. The Tempest is the last play Shakespeare wrote more or less completely on his own—no collaborator and, as far as is known, no direct literary source—and it has the air of a farewell, a valediction to theatrical magic, a retirement.

  Though in exile, the magician Prospero has the kind of power that an absolute monarch could never actually possess, the power that only a great artist has over his characters. The power, as Shakespeare represents it, is hard-won—the result of deep learning and of a trauma in the distant past, “the dark backward and abyss of time” (1.2.50). Prospero had been the Duke of Milan, but, absorbed in his occult studies and inattentive to practical affairs, he was overthrown by his usurping brother. Cast adrift and shipwrecked with his daughter on an ocean island, he has used his secret arts to enslave the deformed and brutish Caliban and to take under his command the spirit Ariel. Then, as the play opens, fate and his own magical powers bring onto the island his enemies. His brother and his brother’s principal ally, along with their dependents, are in his hands. Audiences accustomed to walking by gibbets on their way to
the theater had a very good idea of their likely fate. Prospero does not even have the nominal restraints imposed upon Renaissance rulers by institutions; on the island he rules there are none. If Shakespeare’s principal model for the magician’s realm is the theater, with its bare stage and its experimental openness—a world where anything is possible—another model invoked by the play is one of the islands encountered by European voyagers to the New World. On such islands, as many contemporary reports made clear, restraint tended to melt away, and, for those in command, anything was possible. With years of isolation to brood on his injuries and plan his revenge, Prospero is free to do with his hated enemies entirely as he chooses.

  What he chooses to do—at least by the standards of Renaissance princes and playwrights alike—is next to nothing. For The Tempest is a play not about possessing absolute power but about giving it up. Lear also gives up his power, of course, but that renunciation is a disaster. Prospero reclaims what was his by birthright—the dukedom of Milan, that is, his social authority and wealth in an ordinary, familiar world. But he abandons everything that has enabled him to bring his enemies under his control, to force them to submit to his designs, to manipulate them and the world into which he has introduced them. In short, he abandons the secret wisdom that has made him godlike.

  I have bedimmed

  The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,

  And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault

  Set roaring war—to the dread rattling thunder