A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  An Elizabethan curious about the ruler who had deposed Richard II would have found two titles on the subject in London’s bookstalls this spring: The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV and The History of Henry the Fourth. One was Shakespeare’s, the other written by a thirty-five-year-old lawyer named John Hayward, though it wasn’t immediately clear to book buyers who had written which. Adding to the confusion, it was Hayward’s and not Shakespeare’s book that was called “The First Part”—though only Shakespeare had written a sequel. Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth was selling well. The print run of the two editions of the 1598 First Quarto had sold out rapidly and in 1599 a third edition was printed (of all his plays only Richard the Second had sold this well). But it was Hayward’s book, not Shakespeare’s, that everyone was talking about. Its publisher, John Wolfe (the same man who tried to build a theater in East Smithfield), bragged that “no book ever sold better.”

  Before Hayward turned his manuscript over to his publisher he had to secure a license to have it printed. Concerned about how censors might respond, he omitted a dedication and preface. Authors could apparently choose which official examined their books, and Hayward may have heard that Samuel Harsnett was more lax than most. The custom, according to Harsnett, was for “the author himself to present the book unto the examiner and to acquaint him with his scope and purpose.” But Hayward evaded this direct questioning, persuading a friend to present the book to Harsnett on his behalf. Harsnett later admitted that he didn’t examine the book very carefully, looking no further than the first page before giving it his approval. Hoping to drive up sales and capitalize on contemporary events, John Wolfe persuaded Hayward to add a preface and dedicate the book to Essex, “he being a martial man and going into Ireland, and the book treating of Irish causes.” There were many dedications to the popular and generous earl around this time, but none quite so daring: “You are great indeed, both in present judgment and in expectation of future time.” These were not reassuring words to those who feared Essex’s ambitions.

  Hayward’s history went on sale in early February 1599. By the end of the month, with sales brisk and the book already much talked of, Essex wrote to Archbishop Whitgift, suggesting that Hayward’s dedication be looked into. It’s not clear why Essex did so. Perhaps, in the midst of tense negotiations with the queen over his demands for Ireland, the last thing he wanted was to antagonize her. Or perhaps he had waited before contacting Whitgift in order to have it both ways—allowing Hayward’s dedication to attract notice while seeming to distance himself from it. Skeptics like Francis Bacon believed that Essex knew full well “that forbidden things are most sought after.” A year or so later, Essex’s enemies insisted that he had enjoyed Hayward’s book and accused him of being “often present at the playing thereof, and with great applause giving countenance to it.” It’s impossible to know just what is meant here by the frequent “playing” of Hayward’s history, which had to have taken place in February or early March, before Essex left for Ireland. Were there staged readings at Essex House of dramatic speeches from Hayward’s history? Was Hayward’s work confused with a play on the same subject, privately performed for Essex’s circle? Or was the accusation imaginary and fantastic, just the kind of thing that fed Essex’s paranoia?

  Whatever the case, by late March, after half of the thousand-copy print run had sold, Archbishop Whitgift instructed the Stationers’ Company to tear out the dedication to Essex from all unsold copies. Predictably, the archbishop’s order only heightened interest in the book, and the rest of the print run quickly sold out. In early March, John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton that there “hath been much descanting about” Hayward’s book, especially “why such a story should come out at this time, and many exceptions taken, especially to the epistle which was a short thing in Latin dedicated to the Earl of Essex.” He went on to tell Carleton that “there was a commandment that it should be cut out of the book,” but did his best to get his friend a copy of the offending dedication: “I have got you a transcript of it that you may pick out the offence if you can. For my part, I can find no such bugswords, but that everything is as it is taken.”

  As Chamberlain’s letter makes clear, the big question on everyone’s mind was “why such a story should come out at this time?” The “descanting” or political analysis he mentions eventually led the authorities to ask a host of related questions. Did Hayward “pretend to write a history past but intend to point at this very time”? “Who made the preface to the reader?” “What was the true cause of setting forth this single story?” “What moved him to maintain… that it might be lawful for the subject to depose the king?” And why did his book presuppose “that there should be ill success in Ireland”?

  By Easter, Wolfe reports, with “people calling for” the book “exceedingly,” Hayward submitted to his publisher a revised and expanded text, including a new preface that aggressively challenged “the many imputations and secret senses” attributed to his work by those Hayward dismissively calls the “deep searchers of our time.” But one didn’t have to search very deeply to find obvious similarities between the reigns of Richard II and Elizabeth I, especially when it came to “benevolences” (a punishing form of taxation) and the dangers to the state of a childless ruler. The similarities to Elizabeth’s disastrous Irish policies were especially hard to miss. Then, as now, “The naked and fugitive Irish have shaken off our shackles and glutted themselves upon us, with massacres and spoils.” Queen Elizabeth saw the parallels all too clearly, and famously said, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” The authorities were concerned that Londoners might draw the same conclusions as their rebellious ancestors had two centuries earlier, when they supported a charismatic aristocrat’s overthrow of a childless monarch who had taxed them ruthlessly and mismanaged Ireland.

  JUST AS FEW PLAYGOERS AT A PERFORMANCE OF RICHARD THE SECOND OR The First Part of Henry the Fourth would have been as knowledgeable as Hayward about how Shakespeare transformed his sources, few readers in the early months of 1599 would have grasped as readily as Shakespeare what Hayward had accomplished in his account of how Henry overthrew King Richard. Shakespeare knew all the chronicles that Hayward drew on and would have immediately seen what Hayward invented or exaggerated. Along with Plutarch’s Lives (his main source for Julius Caesar), Hayward’s bestseller was undoubtedly one of the books that Shakespeare was reading closely this winter.

  Shakespeare didn’t need to read far into Hayward’s history to see that he was an avid theatergoer, for the set speeches in the work had great dramatic intensity. Hayward was one of the first English historians since Sir Thomas More to understand how invented speeches made the past come alive, and there are a number of points where his work reads more like a prose play than a chronicle history. As the words of his title—“The Life and Reign”—made clear, Hayward was interested in character and he broke new ground in showing the extent to which history was shaped by personality. Here’s Henry exhorting his followers after agreeing to depose King Richard (lineated as rough verse, it’s easy to see what an actor could do with it):

  If we prevail, we shall recover again our liberty.

  If we lose, our state shall be no worse than now it is.

  And since we must need perish,

  Either deservingly or without cause,

  It is more honorable to put ourselves

  Upon the adventure either to win our lives or die for desert.

  And although our lives were safe, which indeed are not,

  Yet to abandon the state and sleep still in this slavery

  Were a point of negligence and sloth.

  Hayward had missed his calling. It’s easy to imagine dramatic speeches like this “played” by professional actors for Essex’s appreciative followers, stymied as they were by rival factions at court and frustrated by the parsimonious and aging queen.

  If Shakespeare had any doubt about how indebted Hayward was to his own work, he needed to look no further
than Hayward’s insistence on Henry’s pursuit of popularity with the common folk:

  [Henry] for his part was not negligent to uncover the head, to bow the body, to stretch forth the hand to every mean person, and to use all other complements of popular behavior, where with the minds of the common multitude are much delighted and drawn…. The standings in all the streets where he passed were taken up to behold him, and the unable multitude, who otherwise could not, yet by their good words, wishes, and wills did testify unto him their loving affection.

  Hayward knew his Shakespeare, for Henry’s pursuit of popularity had been Shakespeare’s invention, not to be found in any source other than his play’s innovative depiction of a crowd-pleasing Henry, encapsulated in the passage in Richard the Second where York describes Henry’s entry into London:

  You would have thought the very windows spake,

  So many greedy looks of young and old

  Through casements darted their desiring eyes

  Upon his visage, and that all the walls

  With painted imagery had said at once,

  “Jesu preserve thee! Welcome, Bolingbroke!”

  Whilst he, from the one side to the other turning,

  Bareheaded, lower than his proud steed’s neck,

  Bespake them thus: “I thank you, countrymen.”

  And thus still doing, thus he passed along.

  (5.2.12–21)

  As he read Hayward’s bestseller, what made Shakespeare really sit up and take notice wasn’t the provocative dedication, the implied comparison between Richard II and Elizabeth, the allusions to Ireland, or even what was lifted from his own version of the story, so much as Hayward’s sense of how history worked, an approach closely identified at this time with the dark worldview of the Roman writer Tacitus. By comparison, it made his own histories feel old-fashioned and a bit tame. Until now, it was Shakespeare who had consistently made other writers’ work feel dated, not the other way around. Even when Shakespeare’s plays had staged the deposition and murder of God’s anointed, they still couldn’t be seen as advocating regicide (except when it came to the king deposed by the Tudors, Richard III). Whatever his own beliefs, Shakespeare did not—and, if he wanted to see his plays staged and printed, could not—write history that broke quite so radically with a providential worldview. In the spring of 1599, he had to wonder whether these unspoken rules were changing.

  WHAT LITTLE WE KNOW ABOUT WHAT ORDINARY ELIZABETHANS THOUGHT about their leaders survives from trials in which those who criticized the government were punished. So we can only guess about the extent to which the ideas in Hayward’s History resonated with what people were thinking or beginning to say aloud. On February 23, 1599, for example, Joan Bottinge of Chiddingstone told Elizabeth Harris that things wouldn’t improve until “the rich men’s throats were cut and then poor men should be rich.” She added that she “did pray up rising and down lying to God to take away the Queen’s Majesty, and that she would be one that should help to cut the rich men’s throats… and help the Queen’s enemies.” Harris reported this to the authorities, and Bottinge was found guilty and sentenced to hang. A couple of months later, Mary Bunton of Hucking was equally blunt, declaring, “I care not a turd for the Queen nor her precepts.” She was sentenced to be put in the stocks with a paper above her head (probably detailing her crime) and then whipped. When ordinary Englishwomen could question the Elizabethan regime so brazenly, the kind of history found in Hayward was seen, in Queen Elizabeth’s own verdict of the History, as “a seditious prelude to put into the people’s heads boldness and faction.”

  In the late sixteenth century, Tacitus had become a byword for an unflinching view of history. Tacitus, who wrote of the dark days of Nero’s rule, knew how treacherous politics could be. His republican and radical leanings also set his work apart from more moralizing Roman historians, such as Plutarch. Tacitus’s writings were eventually rediscovered and newly appreciated in the decades following the Reformation in a strifetorn Europe that for many observers resembled the ruthless ancient world he depicted. It took a few years for the cult of Tacitus to reach England after the great Continental scholar Justus Lipsius first edited his works in 1574, having found in Tacitus “a theater of everyday life.” Sir Philip Sidney (who corresponded with Lipsius) played an important role in importing Tacitus, though Sidney was also aware of the dangers of this kind of history, warning his younger brother Robert to beware of the “venom of wickedness” he would encounter reading Tacitus. Sir Philip steered his brother to Henry Savile, the Oxford classicist (and Latin secretary to the queen) who in 1591 published the first English version of Tacitus’s writings, dedicating it to Elizabeth, and making available to a far wider readership this history of the dark days of Rome. When Savile’s translation was first published, it may have seemed more relevant to France, torn by civil war, than to England. But by the time it was reprinted in 1598, things at home looked a lot different.

  Savile attracted an eager following that included the Greek scholar Henry Cuffe (a radical type whom Essex pulled out of the ivory tower and appointed as his personal secretary). Among other young thinkers and writers drawn into this Tacitean orbit were Francis Bacon, William Camden, Henry Wotton, William Cornwallis, and Richard Grenewey (who rendered most of what Savile had left untranslated into English in 1598, in a text that included both his own and Savile’s translations and a dedication flatteringly comparing Essex to the Roman commander Vespasian).

  According to Ben Jonson, Essex himself had ghostwritten the preface to Savile’s translation. For the ambitious men in Essex’s circle whose advancement was thwarted in the late 1590s, Tacitus must have sounded like the great diagnostician of the age. If Essex were indeed the author of that preface, he would have been responsible for arguing that in this “story thou shalt see all the miseries of a torn and declining state.” Tacitus’s account of Rome under Nero is a portrait of a weak monarchy in which principle has given way to political scheming, the state crumbling from within. Essex also found attractive—because it suited his sense of injured merit—Tacitus’s juxtaposition of political wranglers with men of action and honor. While Tacitus provided Essex with political and military guidelines he also offered a powerful alternative to writers and readers who found moralizing history increasingly discredited.

  If Shakespeare was drawn to Tacitus, it was the briefest of flirtations. He may well have glanced at the 1591 edition of Savile’s translation when depicting the disastrous reign of Henry VI, especially the painful scene in which a son kills his father in battle. There’s also a chance that he picked up the 1598 English edition of Tacitus while writing Henry the Fifth. The debt occurs in the scene in which Henry walks incognito among his troops on the eve of battle, a scene that may in part be inspired by one that Grenewey had just translated from Tacitus. There, a Roman leader named Germanicus, eager to “sound the soldiers’ mind,” went out disguised at night “in secret and unknown places” to observe the “watch.” He went “from one place to another, stood listening at the tents” and (far more than Shakespeare’s Henry) was reassured by his experience.

  Leafing through Hayward’s History, Shakespeare, with just a passing familiarity with the translations, could not have missed Hayward’s explicit borrowings from recent English renderings of Tacitus. Even a summary of what Hayward lifted from Tacitus would run to a dozen pages. Years later Francis Bacon recorded how an infuriated Queen Elizabeth refused to believe that Hayward had written the History himself and was convinced “that it had some more mischievous author, and said, with great indignation, that she would have him racked to produce his author.” She then asked Bacon if he could “find any places in it that might be drawn within case of treason.” Bacon wittily responded, “ ‘For treason surely I found none, but for felony very many.’ And when her Majesty hastily asked me ‘Wherein?’ I told her, ‘the author had committed very apparent theft; for he had taken most of the sentences of Cornelius Tacitus, and translated them into English, and put
them into his text.’”

  Hayward’s Tacitean history arrived on the heels of a revival of another popular classical genre, satire, which similarly courted censorship by ridiculing the follies of the age. Shakespeare faced a difficult situation. He had to decide, and fairly quickly, whether the authorities were now loosening restrictions on what could be said, or, alternatively, whether a crackdown that could affect his own livelihood was imminent. He could play it safe, but doing so did not come without risks. By avoiding writing about the things that his fellow Elizabethans were excited by he’d lose his audience to writers whose works spoke more directly to their concerns.

  Shakespeare had lived through enough official and seemingly arbitrary acts of suppression to know that another would come soon enough if his fellow writers pursued their current course. Of all the major playwrights of the 1590s, he alone had managed to avoid a major confrontation with those in power. He had seen the innocent Thomas Kyd broken by torture on the rack, Christopher Marlowe possibly assassinated, and Ben Jonson imprisoned for his role in the Isle of Dogs. His rivals were now either dead or impoverished. Genius also meant knowing what you could get away with writing. In the end, he chose to write about the problem of censorship rather than, like Hayward and the satirists, inviting it.

  No play by Shakespeare explores censorship and silencing so deeply as the one he was writing during these months, Julius Caesar. In one of the few scenes that is Shakespeare’s invention, an angry mob fatally mistakes a poet for a conspiring politician. Cinna the Poet is accosted by a crowd of Plebeians who surround and interrogate him. He does his best to humor and distract the mob, but when he tells them his name—Cinna—he is lost. A Plebeian yells, “Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator!”—obviously confusing him with the Cinna who had stabbed Caesar. The poet desperately repeats, “I am Cinna the Poet, I am Cinna the Poet!” It makes no difference. Another rioter chants, “Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses!” Though Cinna again insists, “I am not Cinna the conspirator,” his words cannot save him. That same rioter sways the crowd, saying, “It is no matter, his name’s Cinna. Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going” (3.3.4–36).