The differences in the spelling of his surname can of course be ascribed to the loose and uncertain orthography of the period rather than to any perceived lack of identity, but it does at least suggest that his presence in the world was not fully determined. In a mortgage deed and a purchase deed, signed within hours or even minutes of each other, he signs his name in two completely different ways. It is even supposed by some calligraphers that the three signatures on his will are written by three different people, since the dissimilarities “are almost beyond explanation.”5 The author, as if by some act of magic, has disappeared!
CHAPTER 35
There’s a Great Spirit Gone
Thus Did I Desire It
It the beginning of 1593 Pembroke’s Men resumed playing at the Theatre. Shakespeare’s early plays were part of their repertory. The playbooks or official texts of Titus Andronicus, The True Tragedy of the Duke of York and The Taming of a Shrew, when they were eventually published in volume form, all advertise the fact that these plays were “sundry times acted by the Right honourable the Earle of Pembrook his seruants.” In the playbooks of The True Tragedie and The First Part of the Contention there are very precise stage-directions that suggest the intervention of the author.
But they could not have performed in London for very long. On 21 January, as a result of an epidemic of the plague, the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor ordering him to prohibit “all plays, baiting of bears, bulls, bowling and any other like occasions to assemble any numbers of people together.” So Shakespeare and his companions were obliged once more to leave the capital. They travelled west to Ludlow, part of the Earl of Pembroke’s territory, by way of places such as Bath and Bewdley. At Bath they received 16 shillings, less 2 shillings’ recompense for a bow they had broken. Perhaps it was one of those mentioned in the stage direction of The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, “Enter two keepers with bows and arrows.” In Bewdley they were awarded 20 shillings as “my Lord President his players.” The Earl of Pembroke was known officially as President of Wales. In Ludlow they received the same sum, but were also granted “a quart of white wine and sugar.” In Shrewsbury it was advertised that “my Lord President’s players” were “coming to this town”; here they received no less than 40 shillings.
When they returned to London later in 1593 they were less fortunate. The Theatre, and the other playhouses, were still closed by “the sickness.” It was late June, or early July, and the summer heat was approaching. In this year the epidemic disorder killed fifteen thousand Londoners, more than one-tenth of the population. While on tour in Bath, Edward Alleyn wrote to his wife instructing her “every evening throwe water before your dore and in your bakesid [back of the house] and haue in your windowes good store of rue and herbe of grace.”1
Something else was happening in London. Threats against French, Dutch and Belgian immigrants had been pasted or nailed on the streets. On 5 May a bitterly xenophobic poem of fifty-three lines had been placed on the walls of the Dutch churchyard. It had been signed “Tamburlaine.” Not unnaturally, perhaps, these attacks were considered to be the work of professional writers. So the authors of these “lewd and malicious libels” were to be arrested and examined; if they refused to confess “you shal by auctorities hereof put them to the torture in Bridewel, and by th’extremitie thereof.”2 One of the first arrested was the author of The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd, who was duly put to the torture. He named Christopher Marlowe as a blasphemer. It has been suggested that the entire affair was an elaborate trap by the authorities to snare Kyd and, through Kyd, to detain Marlowe himself.3 Marlowe was called and examined by the Privy Council for two days; he was then released, on condition that he reported daily to their lordships. Ten days later he was dead, stabbed through the eye as a result of an apparent brawl in Deptford. Kyd himself died in the following year. It is hard to overestimate the impact of these events on the fraternity of players. One of their leading playwrights had been killed, in most suspicious circumstances, and another had been tortured almost to death at the instigation of the Privy Council. It was a series of shocking events, of which no one could see the outcome. The uncertainty and anxiety were intense, the fearfulness rendered even worse by the prevalence of the plague and the closure of the theatres.
But there was one other consideration for Shakespeare. The death of Marlowe occurred while he was on tour with Pembroke’s Men, but the report reached him soon enough. This was for him a climactic event. The dramatic poet whom he most admired and imitated was dead. To put it more bluntly, his principal competitor was dead. From this time forward he would have a clear run. It is perhaps not surprising that his great lyrical plays—Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Richard II — emerge in the succeeding four years. In these plays he exorcises, and surpasses, Marlowe’s poetical spirit. The untimely death of Marlowe left Shakespeare as the principal playwright of note in late sixteenth-century London.
The continuation of the plague throughout the summer, however, obliged Pembroke’s Men to tour again. They sold their text of Marlowe’s Edward the Second to a stationer, William Jones, no doubt to raise a modest but necessary sum. The sensation of his death might encourage sales. Then they travelled into the south of England, where they played at Rye for the relatively small sum of 13s 4d. They came back to London in August, and disbanded. They were bankrupt and could no longer cover their costs. On 28 September Henslowe wrote to Edward Alleyn, who was also still “on the road”: “As for my lord of Pembroke’s, which you desire to know where they may be, they are all at home, and have been this five or six weeks; for they cannot save their charges with travel, as I hear, and were fain to pawn the apparel.”4
So Shakespeare was out of employment. But it is not to be believed that such an enterprising and energetic young man would remain idle for very long. With the closure of the theatres at the beginning of the year he must already have been considering the future. Who could tell if, or when, the plague would abate? Would the doors of the London theatres be closed for ever? He must have given serious thought to a possible change in the direction of his career, since in this period he began work on a long poem. From an early stage, too, he may have had in mind the possible benefits accruing from a wealthy patron. Such a patron might offer him employment, in the lean time of the theatres, as well as gifts. Thus in the summer of 1593 his old Stratford acquaintance, Richard Field, published a volume entitled Venus and Adonis. It was priced at about 6 pence, and sold at the sign of the White Greyhound in the haunt of booksellers at Paul’s Churchyard. Field’s shop was no doubt Shakespeare’s haunt, also, where he would have found the new books of the day — among them George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. That treatise had recommended the six-line stanza for English narrative poems, precisely the form that Shakespeare employed in Venus and Adonis. In Field’s shop he would have seen fresh copies of Plutarch’s Lives as translated by Sir Thomas North but, equally significantly, he would have been able to read and perhaps to borrow Field’s new edition of Ovid. He took two lines from that poet as his epigraph for Venus and Adonis. The little shop in Paul’s Churchyard, smelling of ink and paper, helped to give birth to one of the most fluent and eloquent of all English narrative poems.