Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

  In the culture of Tudor and Stuart England, where the old demanded the public deference of the young, retirement was the focus of particular anxiety. It put a severe strain on the politics and psychology of deference by driving a wedge between status—what Lear at society’s pinnacle calls “The name, and all the additions to a king” (1.1.136)—and power. In both the state and the family, the strain could be somewhat eased by transferring power to the eldest legitimate male successor, but as the families of both the legendary Lear and the real Brian Annesley show, such a successor did not always exist. In the absence of a male heir, the aged Lear, determined to “shake all cares and business” from himself and confer them on “younger strengths,” attempts to divide his kingdom among his daughters so that, as he puts it, “future strife / May be prevented now” (1.1.37–38, 42–43). But this attempt, centered on a public love test, is a disastrous failure, since it leads him to banish the one child who truly loves him.

  Shakespeare contrives to show that the problem with which his characters are grappling does not simply result from the absence of a son and heir. In his most brilliant and complex use of a double plot, he intertwines the story of Lear and his three daughters with the story of Gloucester and his two sons, a story he adapted from an episode he read in Philip Sidney’s prose romance, Arcadia. Gloucester has a legitimate heir, his elder son, Edgar, as well as an illegitimate son, Edmund, and in this family the tragic conflict originates not in an unusual manner of transferring property from one generation to another, such as Lear is attempting, but rather in the reverse: Edmund seethes with murderous resentment at the disadvantage entirely customary for someone in his position, both as a younger son and as what was called a base or natural child.

  In the strange universe of King Lear, nothing but precipitous ruin lies on the other side of retirement, just as nothing but a bleak, featureless heath lies on the other side of the castle gate. In Shakespeare’s imagination, the decision to withdraw from work—“To shake all cares and business from our age,” as Lear says, “Conferring them on younger strengths”(1.1.37–38)—is a catastrophe. To be sure, the work in question here is ruling a kingdom, and Shakespeare’s age had every reason to fear the crisis in authority that inevitably accompanied the debility of the ruler and the transfer of power. But the play is not only a warning to monarchs. It taps into a far more pervasive fear in this period, a period that had very few of the means that our society (itself hardly a model of virtue) now routinely employs to ease the anxieties and relieve the needs of the old.

  Shakespeare’s world constantly told itself that authority naturally inhered in the elderly. At stake, they said, was not simply a convenient social arrangement—convenient, in any case, for the old and for anyone who hoped someday to become old—but rather the moral structure of the universe, the sanctified, immemorial order of things. But at the same time, they nervously acknowledged that this order of things was unstable and that age’s claim to authority was pathetically vulnerable to the ruthless ambitions of the young. Once a father had turned over his property to his children, once he had lost his ability to enforce his will, his authority would begin to crumble away. Even in the house that had once been his own, he would become what was called a sojourner. There could even be a ritualized acknowledgment of this drastic change in status, as testimony in a contemporary lawsuit suggests: having agreed to give his daughter in marriage to Hugh, with half of his land, the widower Anseline and the married couple were to live together in one house. “And the same Anseline went out of the house and handed over to them the door by the hasp, and at once begged lodging out of charity.”

  Retelling the Leir story was one way that Shakespeare and his contemporaries articulated their anxiety, but they had other, more practical ways to deal with the fragility of custom. Parents facing retirement frequently hired a lawyer to draw up what were called maintenance agreements, contracts by which, in return for the transfer of family property, children undertook to provide food, clothing, and shelter. The extent of parental anxiety may be gauged by the great specificity of many of these requirements—so many yards of woolen cloth, pounds of coal, or bushels of grain—and by the pervasive fear of being turned out of the house in the wake of a quarrel. Maintenance agreements stipulated that the children were only legal guardians of their parents’ well-being, “depositaries” of the parental property. The parents could “reserve” some rights over this property, and, theoretically at least, if their “reservation” was not honored, they could move to reclaim what they had given away.

  King Lear, set in a pagan Britain roughly contemporary with the prophet Isaiah, is very far from the Renaissance world of customary arrangements and legal protections—the world of the yeomen, artisans, and tradesmen from whose midst Shakespeare had emerged. But, notwithstanding the play’s archaic setting, at the core of the tragedy is the great fear that haunted the playwright’s own class: the fear of humiliation, abandonment, and a loss of identity in the wake of retirement. Lear’s maddened rage is a response not only to his daughters’ vicious ingratitude but also to the horror of being turned into an ordinary old man, a sojourner begging his children for charity:

  Ask her forgiveness?

  Do you but mark how this becomes the house:

  “Dear daughter, I confess that I am old;

  Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg

  That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.”

  (2.4.145–49)

  His cruel daughter, in response, unbendingly proposes that he “return and sojourn with my sister” (2.4.198).

  Near the climax of this terrible scene in which the wicked Goneril and Regan, by relentlessly diminishing his retinue, in effect strip away his social identity, Lear speaks as if he had actually drawn up a maintenance agreement with his daughters:

  LEAR: I gave you all—

  REGAN: And in good time you gave it.

  LEAR: Made you my guardians, my depositaries; But kept a reservation to be followed

  With such a number.

  (2.4.245–48)

  But there is no maintenance agreement between Lear and his daughters; there could be none in the world of absolute power—of all or nothing—that he inhabits.

  Shakespeare had no intention of someday going to the door of New Place, stepping across the threshold, and then asking his daughters to take him back in as a sojourner. It was not a matter of mistrust—he seems to have loved and trusted one of his daughters at least. It was a matter of identity. If King Lear is any indication, he shared with his contemporaries a fear of retirement and dread of dependence upon children. And from the surviving evidence, he could scarcely be expected to find comfort in the enduring bond with his wife. His way of dealing with this fear was work—the enormous labors that enabled him to accumulate a small fortune—and then the investment of his capital in land and tithes (an agricultural commodities investment), so that he could assure himself a steady annual income. He could not count on acting and touring and turning out two plays a year forever; someday it would have to come to a stop. What then? From 1602 to 1613, in the midst of astonishingly creative years, Shakespeare carefully accumulated and laid out his money so that in his old age he would never have to depend upon his daughters—or upon the theater.

  Shakespeare had made his fortune virtually entirely on his own. His mother’s inheritance, such as it was, had been first mortgaged and then forfeited through his father’s incompetence or improvidence; his father’s standing in Stratford had been compromised by debt and possibly by recusancy; his brothers amounted to little or nothing, his sister, Joan, married a poor hatter; and he himself had married a woman of very modest means. No convenient bequests had come his way; no wealthy relations had provided assistance at key moments; and no local magnate had spotted his brilliant promise when he was still a boy and helped him to a start in life. New Place was the tangible fruit of his own imagination and his hard work.

  To acquire such a house meant that Shakespeare had h
ad to save his money. The limited evidence that survives suggests that in London he lived frugally. He rented rooms in relatively modest surroundings: records from a minor lawsuit show that in 1604—the year he wrote part or all of Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and King Lear—he lived above a French wig-maker’s shop on the corner of Mugwell and Silver Streets in Cripplegate, at the northwest corner of the city walls. He seems to have had an affinity for neighborhoods—Shoreditch, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, and the Clink in Surrey—inhabited by artisans, many of whom were émigrés from France or the Low Countries. These were not disreputable haunts, but they were modest, and the rents were low. How many rooms he rented, or how spacious they were, is unknown, but he seems to have furnished them sparsely. His personal property in London, assessed for tax purposes, was only five pounds. (The property of the most affluent inhabitant of the parish was assessed at three hundred pounds.) Of course, Shakespeare could have hidden things away—books, paintings, plate—to reduce his liability, but the assessors at least saw very few signs of wealth.

  Generations of scholars have combed the archives for more details, but the principal records are a succession of notices for the nonpayment of taxes. In 1597, the year Shakespeare bought the handsome New Place, the tax collectors for Bishopsgate ward affirmed that William Shakespeare, assessed the sum of thirteen shillings fourpence on his personal property, had not paid. The next year he was again delinquent, and a further notice, in 1600, when he was living on the Surrey side of the river, suggests that he was still in arrears. He may in the end have paid his taxes—the records are incomplete—but it does not seem likely. Shakespeare was someone who not only lived a modest London life but also hated to let even small sums of money slip through his fingers.

  Perhaps he was worrying about the financial security of his wife and daughters back in Stratford, perhaps he hated the example of his father’s embarrassments, perhaps he told himself that he would do anything not to end up like the wretched Greene. For whatever the reason, Shakespeare seems to have treated money—his money at least—with considerable seriousness. No one refers to him as a skinflint, but he did not like to waste his substance, and he was clearly determined not to be an easy mark for anyone. In 1604 he was storing more malt in his barn in Stratford than he (or, more to the point, his wife) needed for domestic consumption. He sold twenty bushels of it to a neighboring apothecary, Philip Rogers, who had a sideline brewing ale. Rogers’s debt, including another two shillings he borrowed from Shakespeare, amounted to a little over two pounds. When the debtor returned only six shillings, Shakespeare hired a lawyer and took his neighbor to court to recover the remaining thirty-five shillings tenpence and damages. Thirty-five shillings tenpence was not a trivial sum at the time, but neither was it a king’s ransom. It took energy to pursue the matter, just as it took energy a few years later when Shakespeare once again went to court to recover the six pounds, plus damages, that he said was owed to him by John Addenbrooke.

  Shakespeare was hardly alone in pursuing such small sums; he lived in a litigious age, and the courts were flooded with suits of this kind. But no one forced him to go through the process, made all the more time-consuming by the fact that in some of these cases he probably had to travel to Stratford to do so. No, the odd pounds and shillings and pence must have mattered to him, and not, strictly speaking, because the owner of New Place needed them to live on.

  Standing in the graveyard at Elsinore, Hamlet contemplates a skull that the gravedigger has dislodged with his dirty shovel: “This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land,” he remarks to Horatio,

  with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must th’inheritor himself have no more, ha? (5.1.94–102)

  It is altogether fitting that Hamlet should speak with such wry disdain. For on the one hand, he is the prince of Denmark, far above mere mon-eygrubbing, and on the other hand, as he has made overwhelmingly clear, he is indifferent to all worldly ambition. But where did Prince Hamlet, we might wonder, get his technical knowledge of the property law he despises—recognizances, double vouchers, recoveries, and the like? From someone who had a lively interest in land purchases: the playwright himself. Is this hypocrisy? Not at all. Shakespeare could imagine what it would feel like to be a melancholy prince and conjure up his brooding laughter at the vanity of human striving, but he himself could not afford to be indifferent to the everyday enterprise of making a living.

  At the time he was writing Hamlet’s lines about the “great buyer of land,” Shakespeare’s interest in real estate investments was apparently becoming known to his fellow townsmen, who must, in any event, have been struck by his worldly success. In 1598 Abraham Sturley of Stratford wrote to a friend, then in London, that according to information he had received, “our countryman Mr. Shaksper is willing to disburse some money upon some odd yardland or other at Shottery or near about us.” These are Stratford businessmen consulting with each other about the best way to get their “countryman” to invest in some scheme of theirs—the playwright was evidently regarded as both wealthy enough and canny enough to make a careful, coordinated approach to him worthwhile.

  In May 1602 Shakespeare paid £320 for four “yardlands”—well over one hundred acres—of arable land in Old Stratford, north of Stratford-upon-Avon. A few months later he acquired title to a quarter-acre parcel, comprising a garden and a cottage, just opposite his garden at New Place. And in July 1605, a year after he took Rogers to court for thirty-five shillings, Shakespeare paid the very substantial sum of £440 for a half interest in a lease of “tithes of corn, grain, blade, and hay” in and around Stratford. The lease—in effect an annuity—brought him £60 per annum. He was planning for his future: the profit from the tithes would continue through his lifetime and into the lives of his heirs.

  An investment of this size reflected the exceptionally large income that Shakespeare was earning in the early years of the reign of James I. The suppression of The Tragedy of Gowrie could have harmed both Shakespeare’s company and his career, but it did not. James displayed a peculiar quality that contemporaries would repeatedly note: he was nervous, sensitive, and on occasion dangerously paranoid, but then unexpectedly he could ignore or even laugh uproariously at what others—and not only absolute monarchs—could have taken as gross insults. In the case of the premier theater company of his new kingdom, he may simply have regarded the players as too insignificant to care about, for good or ill. Or perhaps he regarded the players as a collective version of the court jester, whom Shakespeare depicts with such wry sympathy in Twelfth Night, King Lear, and elsewhere: the master can on occasion be annoyed with or even threaten his clown—“Take heed, sirrah; the whip” (King Lear, 1.4.94)—but it would be vulgar to get more seriously nettled.

  The King’s Men were exceptionally busy, both at court and at the Globe, and Shakespeare must have been heavily involved as writer, director, and actor, as well as principal business partner. His workload must have been staggering. He would have had to keep track of the receipts and expenditures; rewrite some of the scenes; help with the casting; decide on cuts; weigh in on interpretive decisions; consult on the properties, costumes, and music; and of course memorize his own parts. We have no idea in how many of the plays he actually appeared in the frenetic 1604–5 season, but it must have been more than a few. In such circumstances, the companies were not large enough to exempt one of its named actors from the stage, even if that particular actor was busy with a dozen other things. His name appears as one of the ten “principal comedians” in a 1598 performance of Every Man In his Humour. Presumably, he appeared in this play again at its court revival, and he probably made appearances in at least some of his
own plays, many of which, notwithstanding the doubling of parts, require large casts.

  Even for actors extraordinarily well trained in the arts of memory—and even for the playwright who wrote the plays—it must have been exhausting to mount so many complex productions in such a short time. But, of course, the invitation to perform before the king and the court was a signal honor, as well as a rich source of income: receiving a handsome £10 per performance, the company made £100 in the Christmas and New Year’s season of 1605–6, £90 in that of 1606–7, £130 in 1608–9 and again in 1609–10, and £150 in 1610–11. These are very large sums of money, earned in the short holiday season. Meanwhile, the company continued to perform a full repertoire of plays at the Globe, and they still on many occasions packed their gear and went on tour: Oxford in May and June 1604; Barnstaple and Oxford again in 1605; Oxford, Leicester, Dover, Saffron Walden, Maidstone, and Marlborough in 1606. We do not know if Shakespeare went on all of these trips; by the early fall it was already time for him to think hard about the coming season, when the company would introduce new plays, revive still others, perform again at court, keep their public audience happy at the Globe.