Continued decline in the affairs of John Shakespeare—William Shakespeare’s success in London—Death of Hamnet, William Shakespeare’s only son—Shakespeare buys New Place—He retires to Stratford—Writes his last play, The Tempest—His death.

That Shakespeare left his wife and family at home at Stratford-on-Avon every one takes for granted. He “deserted his family,” says a rabid Baconian, who elsewhere complains of the lack of evidence to support believers in the dramatist; forgetting that there is no evidence for this “desertion” story; only one of those many blanks in the life of this elusive man, by which it would appear that while he was reaching fame and making money in London as a playwright and an actor, he held no communication with his kith and kin. There remains no local record of William Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon between the year 1587, when he joined with his father in mortgaging the property at Asbies, Wilmcote, which had been his mother’s marriage portion, until 1596, when the register of the death of Hamnet, his only son, occurs at Stratford church, on August 11th. But this is sheer negative evidence of his not having visited his native town for over ten years, and is on a par with the famous Baconian argument that because no scrap of Shakespeare’s handwriting, except six almost illegible signatures, has survived, therefore he cannot have written the plays still attributed to him.

Meanwhile, his father’s affairs steadily grew worse, and in 1592 he was returned as a “recusant” by the commissioners who visited the town for the purpose of fining the statutable fine of £20 all those who had not attended church for one month. John Shakespeare’s recusancy has been unwarrantably assumed to be due to Roman Catholic obstinacy; but the fine was remitted because it was shown that he was afraid to go to church “for processe of debt”; which, together with the infirmities of age, or sickness, was a lawful excuse.

Shakespeare’s success in London as an actor, a reviser and editor of old and out-of-date plays, as manager, theatre-proprietor and playwright, is due to that sprack-witted capacity for excelling in almost any chosen field of intellectual activity with which a born genius is gifted. The saying that “genius is a capacity for taking pains” is a dull, plodding man’s definition. Genius will very often fling away the rewards of its powers through just this lack of staying power, and no plodding pains will supply that intuitive knowledge, that instant perception, which is what we call genius.

It was the psychological moment for such an one as Shakespeare to come to London. The drama had future before it: the intellectual receptivity of the Renascence permeated all classes, and the country was prosperous and growing luxurious. Playwrights were numerous, but as yet their productions had not reached a high level, excepting those of Marlowe, to whose inspiration Shakespeare at first owed much. If Shakespeare lived in these times he would be called a shameless plagiarist, for he went to other authors for his plots—as Chaucer had done with his Canterbury Tales, two hundred years earlier, and as all others had done in between. Not a man of them would escape the charge; but what Shakespeare took of plot-construction and of dialogue he transmuted from the dull and soulless lines we could not endure to read to-day, into a clear fount of wit, wisdom and literary beauty.

Shakespeare’s career of playwright began as a hack writer and cobbler of existing plays. As an actor his technical knowledge of the requirements of the stage rendered his help invaluable to managers, and the conditions of that time gave no remedy to any author whose plays were thus altered. It may be supposed from lack of evidence to the contrary, that most other dramatic authors submitted to this treatment in silence; perhaps because they had all been employed, at some time or other in the same way. But one man seems to have bitterly resented a mere actor presuming to call himself an author. This was Robert Greene, who died Sept. 3rd, 1592, after a long career of play-writing and pamphleteering. He died a disappointed man, and wrote a farewell tract, published after his death, which includes a warning to his fellow-authors and an undoubted attack upon Shakespeare, under the thin disguise of “Shake-scene.”

It is to be considered that Shakespeare had by this time been five years in London; that he had proved himself singularly adaptable, and had finally, on March 3rd, 1592, attained his first popular success, in the production at the newly-opened “Rose Theatre” on Bankside, Southwark (third London playhouse, opened February 19th, 1592), of Henry the Sixth. It was a veritable triumph. The author played in his own piece, and the other dramatists looked on in dismay. Jealousy does not seem to have followed Shakespeare’s good fortune, and the numerous references to him as poet and playwright by others are kindly and fully recognise his superiority. Only Greene’s posthumous work exists to show how one resented it. The tract has the singular title of “A Groats-Worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance.” Incidentally it warns brother-dramatists against “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum is, in his ovine conceite, the only Shake-scene in a countrie.”

The identification of this crow in borrowed plumage, this “Shake-scene,” is completed by the line, “O tiger’s heart, wrapp’d in a woman’s hide,” which is a quotation from the Third Part of Henry the Sixth, where the Duke of York addresses Queen Margaret; while the term “Johannes factotum,” i.e. “Johnny Do-everything,” is a sneer at Shakespeare’s adaptability and many-sided activities.

The merits of Shakespeare as an actor are uncertain. Greene seems to imply that he was of the ranting, bellowing type who tore a passion to tatters and split the ears of the groundlings. Rowe, who wrote of him in 1709 says: “The top of his performance (as an actor) was the Ghost in his own Hamlet”; not an exacting part; other traditions say Adam in As You Like It, an even less important character, was his favourite; but the suggestion we love the better to believe is that his best part was the cynical, melancholy, philosophic Jaques. Donnelly, chief of the Bacon heretics, has in his Great Cryptogram, a weird story of how Bacon wrote the part of Falstaff for Shakespeare, to fit his great greasy stomach. He knew Shakespeare could not act, and so provided a part in which no acting should be required; turning Shakespeare’s natural disabilities to account, so that, if the audience could not laugh with him in his acting, they should laugh at him and dissolve into merriment at the clumsy antics of so fat a man!There are actor-managers in our times—no actor-author-managers like Shakespeare—who deserve the cat-calls and the missiles of their audiences. They do not merely “lag superfluous on the stage,” but ought never to be on it; like the celebrated actor-manager whose impersonation of Hamlet was, according to Sir W. S. Gilbert’s caustic remark, “funny without being vulgar.” It is not conceivable that Shakespeare himself, who puts such excellent advice to actors into the mouth of Hamlet, should himself have been incompetent.

With Shakespeare’s leap into fame, in 1592, went a simultaneous “boom,” as it might now be termed, in theatres and the drama. Theatres multiplied in London, theatrical companies grew prosperous, and such men as Shakespeare, Merle and the Burbages amassed wealth.

In 1596 died William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, whose burial register in the books of Holy Trinity church, Stratford, runs—

“August 11th, Hamnet, filius William Shakespeare.” His father must surely have been present on this occasion. This year is generally said to be that in which the dramatist who in his time had played many parts, returned to his native town, a made man. He came back with his triumphs ringing fresh in his ears, for that season witnessed the great success of the production of Romeo and Juliet. In July, also, his father had applied to the Heralds’ College for a grant of arms, an application for a patent of gentility which would have come absurdly from a penniless tradesman. The inference therefore, although we have no documentary evidence to that effect, is that William Shakespeare had not only kept in touch with his people, but had helped his father out of his difficulties and was himself the instigator of this application for a grant of arms. The application was eventually successful. The arms thus conferred are: “Or, on a bend sable, a tilting spear of the first, point upwards, steeled proper. Crest, a falcon, his wings displayed, argent, standing upon a wreath of his colours and supporting a spear in pale, or.” The motto chosen was “Non sanz droiet.”

What was this right to heraldic honours and the implied gentility they carried, the Shakespeares claimed? It was based upon a quibble that John Shakespeare’s “parent, great-grandfather and late antecessor, for his faithful and approved service to the most prudent prince king H. 7 of famous memorie, was advanced and rewarded with lands and tenements geven to him,” etc. The description of the miserly Henry the Seventh as “prudent” is, like “mobled queen,” distinctly “good”; but we are not greatly concerned with that, only with the fact that the martial and loyal antecessors claimed for John Shakespeare were really those of his wife. He adopted his wife’s family, or rather, her family’s pretensions to call cousins with the more famous Ardens.

William Shakespeare had returned to Stratford a well-to-do man, with an income which has been estimated at about £1300 of our money, but he had not yet completed his work, and his reappearance in his native town was not permanent. You figure him now, the dramatist and manager, with considerable shares in the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, rather concerned to relinquish the trade—not a profession, really, you know—of actor, but with his company much in request at Court and in the mansions of the great. He was, one thinks, a little sobered by the passage of time; and by the death, this year, of his only son; and quite sensible of the dignity that new patent of arms had conferred upon his father and himself. To mark it, he bought in 1597 a residence, the best residence in the town, although wofully out of repair. It was known, with some awe, to his contemporaries as “the great house.” Sixty pounds sterling was the purchase money: we will say £480 of present value. It was bought so cheaply probably because of its dilapidated condition, for it seems to have been built by Sir Hugh Clopton in 1485, and at this time was “in great ruyne & decay & unrepayred.” Shakespeare thoroughly renovated his newly-acquired property, and styled it “New Place.”

He did not, apparently, at once take up his residence here, for his theatrical company was acting before the Queen at Whitehall in the spring and he would doubtless have been present, and perhaps accompanied them when they were on tour in Kent and Sussex in the summer. But he was at Stratford a part of the next year, which was a year of scarcity. He had accumulated a large stock of corn, over against the shortage, and in a return made of the quantity of grain held in the town he held ten quarters. In the January of this year he contemplated buying some land at Shottery. “Our countriman, Mr. Shaksper,” wrote Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney on January 24th, “is willinge to disburse some monei upon some od yarde land or other att Shotterei or neare about us.” It would seem that Shakespeare did not, after all, purchase this land. Perhaps he could not get it a bargain, and what we know of his business transactions, small though it may be, all goes to show that he was a keen dealer and not at all likely to spend his money rashly.

This year is remarkable for the writing of a letter to Shakespeare by Richard Quiney, the only letter addressed to him now in existence. It is dated October 25th and addressed from Carter Lane, in the City of London. Shakespeare was apparently then at Stratford—

“To my Loveinge good ffrende and contreymann Mr. Wm. shackespere dlr thees:

“Loveinge Contreyman, I am bolde of yow, as of a ffrende, craveinge yowr helpe with xxx li uppon Mr. Bushell’s & my securytee, or Mr. Myttons with me. Mr. Rosswell is nott come to London as yeate, & I have especiall cawse yow shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the debettes I owe in London, I thancke god, & muche quiet my mynde wch wolde nott be indebeted. I am nowe towardes the Cowrte, in hope of answer for the dispatche of my Buysenes. Yow shall nether loase credytt nor monney by me, the Lorde wyllinge; & nowe butt perswade yowrself soe, as I hope, & yow shall not need to feare butt with all hartie thanckefullenes I wyll holde my tyme & content yowr ffrende, & yf we Bargaine farther, yow shalbe the paiem^r. yowrselfe. My tyme biddes me hastene to an ende, & soe I commit thys [to] yowr care, & hope of your helpe. I feare I shall nott be backe thys night ffrom the Cowrte. Haste. The Lorde be with yow and with vs all, amen. ffrom the Bell in Carter Lane, the 25th October, 1598.

“Yowrs in all kyndnes
“Rye. Quyney.”

There is nothing to show directly what was Shakespeare’s reply to this request for the loan of so considerable a sum; which, however, was not the personal matter it would seem to be. Quiney was a substantial man, mercer and alderman of Stratford, and was in London, incurring debts in the interests of the town, whose law business he was furthering. He wanted nothing for himself.

It is curious that this letter was discovered among the town’s papers, not among any Shakespeare relics, and it is believed was never actually sent after being written; for another letter is extant, addressed by one of the town council, Abraham Sturley, to Quiney, on November 4th, in which he says: “Ur letter of the 25 October . . . which imported . . . that our countriman Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure us monei. . . .” It would appear, therefore, that on the very day he was writing, Quiney had received assurance from Shakespeare that he would lend.

In 1600 Shakespeare’s company played before the Queen at Whitehall, and on several occasions in 1602: their last performance being at Richmond in Surrey on February 2nd, 1603. The following month the great Queen died. In 1602 Shakespeare had been buying land in the neighbourhood of Snitterfield and Welcombe from the Combes; no less than 107 acres, and in succeeding years he considerably added to it; further, in July 1605, expending £440 in the purchase of tithes. Early in September 1601, his father, John Shakespeare, had died. Seven years later, also in September, died his mother. In 1607, his eldest daughter, Susanna, married Dr. John Hall, and on the last day of the same year his brother Edmund, an actor, was buried in St. Saviour’s, Southwark.

It was in 1609 that Shakespeare retired permanently to Stratford. He and his players had been honoured by the new sovereign from the very beginning of his reign; but Shakespeare now severed his active connection with the stage. In this year his famous Sonnets were published, those sugared verses addressed to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he laments having made himself “a motley to the view.” Henceforth he would be a country gentleman and dramatic author, and let who would seek the applause of the crowd. He now wrote the Taming of the Shrew, whose induction is permeated with local allusions; he bought more land in the neighbourhood of Stratford; he kept some degree of state at New Place. In 1611 he sold his shares in the theatres, but in 1612 bought property at Blackfriars. Thus Shakespeare passed his remaining years. As Rowe, his earliest biographer says, they were spent “as all men of good sense will wish theirs to be; in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends.”

His last dramatic work, The Tempest, was written in 1611, and bears evidences of being consciously and intentionally his last. It is easily dated, because of the references in it to the “still vex’d Bermoothes,” the Bermuda islands, which were discovered by Admiral Sir George Somers’ expedition in 1609. The “discovery” was made by the Admiral’s ship, the Sea Venture, being driven in a storm on the hitherto unknown islands. The disasters, the adventures, and the strange sights and sounds of the isles were described by Sylvester Jourdain, one of the survivors, in an account published October 1610, called “A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Isle of Divels.”

Shakespearean students find a purposeful solemnity in the treatment of the play, and some perceive in the character of the magician, Prospero, a portraiture of himself, his work done, and with a foreboding of his end, oppressed with a sense of the brief span and the futility of life—

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

Thus he brings his labours to an end—

“this rough magic
I here abjure; and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, (which even now I do,)
. . . I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I’ll drown my book.”

The retirement of Shakespeare rather curiously synchronises with the spread of Puritanism, that slowly accumulating yet irresistible force which, before it had expended its vigour and its wrath was destined to abolish for many years the theatre and the actor’s calling, and even to behead a king and work a political revolution. The puritan leaven was working even in Stratford, and in 1602 the town council solemnly decided that stage-plays were no longer to be allowed, and that any one who permitted them in the town should be fined ten shillings. This edict apparently became a dead letter, but in 1612 it was re-enacted and the penalty raised to £10.

We may perhaps here pertinently inquire: Did Shakespeare himself become a Puritan? Probably so moderate and equable a man as he seems to have been belonged to no extreme party; but it is to be noted that Dr. John Hall, husband of his eldest daughter, was a Puritan, and that Susanna herself is described in her epitaph as “wise to salvation,” which means that she also had found the like grace.

In 1614 Shakespeare seems to have entertained a Puritan divine at New Place, according to a somewhat ambiguous account in the Stratford chamberlain’s accounts, in which occurs the odd item: “One quart of sack and one quart of claret wine given to the preacher at New Place.” If we may measure his preaching by his drinking, he must have delivered poisonously long sermons. But the town council were connoisseurs in sermons, just as the council of forty years earlier had been patrons of the drama; and they sought out and welcomed preachers, just as their forbears had done with the actors. Only those divines do not seem to have been paid for their services, except in drink. They were all thirsty men, and the council rewarded their orations with the same measure as given to the preacher at New Place.

In January 1616, William Shakespeare instructed his solicitor to draft his will. No especial reason for this settlement of his worldly affairs appears to be recorded. In February his daughter Judith was married to Thomas Quincy, vintner, son of that Richard who eighteen years earlier had sought to borrow the £30. In March he was taken ill and the draft will was amended without being fair-copied, a sign, it may be argued, of urgency. It bears date March 25th, and has three of the poet’s signatures; one on each sheet. But he lingered on until April 23rd, dying on the anniversary of his birthday.